The cheapest, quickest, and safest way to fix the crumbling Palace of Westminster is for MPs and Peers to move out of the building for a major renovation programme. This is the main finding of the Restoration and Renewal Client Board’s new report Delivering restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster: the costed proposals.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is: full decant of the Palace was found to be the cheapest, quickest, and safest delivery option for these major works in reports published in 2015, 2016, 2021, and 2022. It was even endorsed by MPs and Peers in 2018. And yet the new report has stopped short of endorsing full decant, instead proposing that it should be the MPs in the next Parliament who will choose between moving out or staying in the Palace during the works: despite the latter costing more than twice as much and taking more than twice as long.

Full decant vs EMI+: Costs and timelines compared

The costed proposals estimate that full decant would cost up to £15.6 billion (including inflation) and take up to 24 years. In contrast, Enhanced Maintenance and Improvements+ (EMI+) — the name given to a scenario where the House of Lords moves out of the Palace and the Commons sits in the Lords chamber — would cost up to £39.2 billion and take up to 61 years. The timeline in the report states that a refusal to decant would mean the works to the Palace would not be complete until 2086, a date when even the youngest current life peer will turn 90.

Beyond the cost and duration of the works, the EMI+ option would also mean higher levels of health, safety, fire, and security risks. It would also mean worse accessibility — something which should not be a minor factor, given the shameful experience faced by many disabled people visiting or working within the Palace at present. The report also warns that even if MPs insist on remaining in Palace, they may face an unplanned decant, if the disruption from trying to legislate within a building site becomes “intolerable”.

A stark account of a building in decline

The report is hard-hitting and clear. It is a credit to the members of the Client Board and the parliamentary staff who drafted it. The detailing of infrastructure defects in just a single month is powerful: a tale of failing sewerage systems, water leaks and the Lords shivering without heating. The list of asbestos exposures, failing masonry, and fires over the last decade is sobering; just one of these incidents could have caused a loss of life. While some on social media have pointed to the absence of a catastrophic incident over this time as a reason why R&R isn’t necessary, this negates the tireless work of fire wardens and maintenance staff — and a hefty dose of continued good fortune.

In the long-term the very best outcome remains, as the report states, “an expensive managed decline of the Palace of Westminster” and the loss of this iconic building. The worst-case scenario is hard to comprehend. This is a site that attracts a million visitors a year — from schoolchildren on tours, to people wanting to meet individually with their MP — but is also the workplace for 18,000 people, including clerks, librarians, baristas, hairdressers, heritage experts, researchers and, of course, 650 MPs and around 800 Peers.

Does the report pull its punches?

It is a pity then, that the report falls short of endorsing the solution that its own analysis finds to be the cheapest, quickest, and safest way to fix the Palace. It calls instead for MPs and Peers to approve a package of “phase one works”. While this would include asking parliamentarians to formally re-commit to R&R, it would delay the final choice between full decant and EMI+ to “no later than mid-2030” — but clearly no earlier than the next general election. This will, the report states, allow MPs to make “a genuine choice” about whether they want to decant or not (the Lords, the report notes, will only be choosing between a short and long decant).

The level of detail in the costed proposals show that parliamentarians could make an informed choice now, if there was political will to so do. The reasons why this will not happen, and the decision will be pushed to 2030 (a date that will come three decades after the problems of the building were first revealed in a basement condition survey) are predictable.

Emotional attachment and institutional inertia

Deep within the costed proposals we can read that MPs and Peers told the Programme Board that a benefit of EMI+ would be “a reduced risk of erosion of Parliament’s culture, procedures or quality of debate and scrutiny” from leaving the building, even temporarily. I have written about the emotional connection between parliamentarians and the Palace, the connection they feel to their predecessors, the deep-rooted concern that a temporary departure will become permanent, and how MPs may feel deprived of sitting on the green benches that mark their hard-fought election victories.

The cost argument

More prosaically, the report’s proposed delay to the final decision also reflects concern at the costs. This is familiar: five years ago, in a Hansard Society blog, I wrote that:

The difficult truth remains the same as it was in 2007, 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018: not wanting to spend money on the Palace of Westminster will not make the essential repairs cheaper or, indeed, less essential.

There remains a belief that it must be possible to do R&R more cheaply, that we cannot spend so many billions on fixing a single building, that it will be filled with unnecessary luxuries and gold-plating. Comparisons are made to other buildings: churches, council chambers, Buckingham Palace. But such comparisons rarely reflect the complexity of the Palace of Westminster: a working legislature within a grade 1 listed structure, a building that covers the same area as sixteen football pitches, across sixty-five different levels, and contains 14 miles of cabling and 250 miles of pipework. A building with an estimated 2,500 separate sites of asbestos, with removal requiring some 300 people working for two and a half years (if the site was not being used).

Delay has a price – and it keeps rising

Critics also fail to engage with the added cost – estimated at around £250 million per year - from the continued delays: R&R would have been a lot cheaper a decade ago, or a decade before that. It will keep getting more expensive the longer it is delayed. Parliament is already spending around £70 million a year in “patch and mend” running repairs and maintenance. It would be better spent on long-term works under the full decant option.

In the face of the concerns, it is easy to understand why the Client Board, despite writing such a clear and emphatic report, pulled its punches when it comes to endorsing full decant. But the risks of doing so must also be understood. A recommendation for a decision no later than “mid-2030” means little: almost every timescale given for debates, reports, and decisions on R&R over the last 14 years has been delayed, sometimes by months, often by years. With a general election due by 2029, and both current opinion polling and the record of the last two elections, suggesting another significant turnover of MPs, what are the chances that those newly elected seek yet another review of the options or more time to consider what should be done?

An abdication of responsibility?

If there is a change of government in 2029 it is unlikely that the new Chancellor will be magically more in favour of spending billions on the Palace; after all, this didn’t happen when the occupants of Downing Street changed in 2024. The commitment to R&R recommended in the costed proposals will just be another one to add to the report’s list of six previous commitments made by Parliament — none of which have led to actual spades in the ground.

In my previous blog, I criticised MPs for “seeking yet more and more reviews in the hope of finding a new answer” rather than proceeding with full decant. The costed proposals again show there is no new answer and no feasible alternative to full decant. The report also shows the serious and continuing risks to this iconic building: a symbol of democracy, and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Punting a final decision on delivering Restoration and Renewal may well be go down in history as an abdication of responsibility by this Parliament.