Act now or UK parliament could be next Notre Dame inferno, MPs and peers told
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/31/uk-parliament-could-be-next-notre-dame-inferno-unless-restoration-is-expedited
Posted by Zhukov-74
Act now or UK parliament could be next Notre Dame inferno, MPs and peers told
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/dec/31/uk-parliament-could-be-next-notre-dame-inferno-unless-restoration-is-expedited
Posted by Zhukov-74
35 Comments
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Is that a threat, a confession, or an attempt at predictive programming? How odd
Regardless of what you may think of its inhabitants, losing such a building to fire would be a tragedy.
Having worked on some of these buildings, you’d be shocked how many are kept together by little more than wishful thinking, and how long the backlog of maintenance is.
Although perhaps not that shocked, given the state of a lot of our infrastructure.
The press would scream bloody murder if Reeves approved spending billions on restoring Parliament. ‘They’re fixing their own office while we freeze!’ would be seen every day in the Daily Mail. It will probably be left to burn down.
And when it happens it’ll be as a result of the British obsession with “tradition” even in the face of overwhelming impracticalities.
We should build (or rather, long ago have built) a new parliament, with enough seats and offices for all MPs, properly wired for recording (those in charge have obviously done a very good job getting the current building wired for tv / live streaming, but I would bet big that it’s a nasty mess behind the scenes) and (fast!) electronic voting.
Leave the current building as a museum (after it’s properly fixed up, which will be much easier and likely cheaper if it’s not in active use).
I’m sure some British designer could be commissioned to make the new building still feel suitably “traditional” and they can still have their maces, guards on the doors and silly ceremonies.
The issue here is a general neglect of public assets, this is just one of many examples. My local library is constantly leaking from the roof into a bucket. Britain is semi-derelict due to austerity.
It’s cool… they’ll rebuild it like they have with Notre Dame.
In which case, move the seat of government to Yorkshire.
It’s a palace holding the King’s government… maybe he can pay for it?
If only there was a High Speed rail line to somewhere less expensive and more suitable for a custom built seat of Government.
I’ve said it before and so have others. The only real logical solution to this issue would be if we build a new parliament building. Yes it would take a few years to design and build a new one, but it would be much more for purpose. Place it in some central location in the uk, with ample public transport connections so all the MP can easily and sustainably get to parliament as and when required whilst being able to maximise their time spent in their local areas. It would also provide a huge boost to the new area and its surroundings. Now there are two main ways we can look at the design; one is to design it to be a temporary parliament thus it can be adapted and repurposed after the renovation of parliament has finished. Two; we design it as a permanent parliament, with the old structure being renovated and repurposed either as a tourist attraction or as some other government building.
And before people start going on about tradition, yes this building has a great deal of historical importance and tradition associated with it. However, the thing is with tradition is we create it ourselves we can absolutely create new traditions – think how wearing white wedding dresses was only popularised due to Queen Victoria wearing white, thus a new tradition was born. But we can say doing nothing about the unfit design and condition of the building isn’t going to aid anyone and may even result in huge chunks of history being lost in fire.
Wouldn’t be the first time.
I know Barry and Pugin did a good job last time but maybe it’s time for a replacement.
What needs to happen is for everybody to be kicked out and I do mean everybody, all objects, paintings, furniture etc to be put into storage which within itself would be a huge undertaking and a full floor to roof, wall to wall restoration undertaken.
Yes it will be eye watering expensive, yes it will take decades to complete however it would also employ thousands of highly skilled trades and it would help to ensure that the entire complex lasts hundreds of years more.
However it will never happen.
Far too many people would complain, cry and bitch about the costs, Ministers and Civil Serpent’s would fight tooth and nail not to be kicked out.
What will happen is that a very small group of underpaid people will continue to try and hold things together for pennies until either a huge fire breaks out, part of the building collapses or some other catastrophic event occurs.
It will then become a blame game with Ministers, Lords and other Government employees blaming each other whilst the British Public and Media all suffer from memory loss and demand to know why action wasn’t taken earlier.
the Notre Dame inferno comparison is interesting given that most of us would side with Guy Fawkes if we were honest.
I guess we should prevent from the building from going up in flames, but if those flames had a “stop simping for billionaires” message attached to them, I would not be anywhere near the front of the line to help save Parliament.
If we could afford it I’d say we need a new Parliament building that is fit for the future and turn Westminster into a museum of Parliament or something.
The work needed to the Houses of Parliament is the exemplar of public sector attitude to maintaining assets. The first thing that gets routinely cut in budgets is maintenance of things, because it’s easier to put sticking plasters on things and carry on. It gets to the point that the asset is in a dire state needing exorbitant amounts of spending otherwise it will fall down because there are that many sticking plasters and duct tape that it’s the only thing holding the asset together.
It’s everywhere, I’m sure private sector is just as bad if not worse but they are less likely to kick the can down the road. They won’t be able to come to a decision even as the fire rages, and by that point the decision will be made for them. We’ll end up with a drab grey parliament that is touted as being wonderful and shiny, vacant of any character and it will cost the taxpayer billions and be here in 15 years. Then we’ll find out that it can’t be used for some reason.
Would it be such a bad thing? Might drag our politics away from the pomp, costumes, and adversarial harrumphing and into the 21st century.
Time for them to work from home and live with their constituents
Hang on, [restoration snd refurbishments](https://www.restorationandrenewal.uk/) have started, and been allocated budget, what else needs to be paid for?
Probably better to have it be paid for by insurance when it happens than the cost that they’d try and put through to pay for it with their little brown paper bags to their mates included and 6 layers of consulting engineers for every stage. It’d be like HS2 again – it might cost £30b but it’s now going to cost £50b, so sorry, need to put your taxes up again guys. But remember this is a building we’ve inherited from the previous conservative government, if only they’d have told us the full story and we could have accounted for it. Blah blah blah.
Oh great, we can spend billions on it and have it take decades.
Yeah, parliament needs a massive refurbishment to bring it up to modern standards. The only problem is, while I do think it’s needed, and in the long term would be a good thing, the amount of billions spent on a refurbishment will not sit well with the general public.
Wasn’t parliament due to move to a more modern temporary location whilst they made repairs a few years back?
They should move North anyway, build new facilities in Middlesbrough or in Mansfield. Or better still, create a new city with good transport links, East Midlands Parkway?
Turn this place into the museum it should be.
Doing my bit to help.
0118, 999, 881, 999, 119, 725…3
Its a wonderful historical building but to spend hundreds of millions of pounds fixing a roof would infuriate a nation who are already on our arses. The current estimate is between £10 & 22 billion I believe, which is completely insane even by Britain’s standards. And when have we ever completed anything on-time & on-budget?
All taxes to go up by 800% to cover the costs and give contracts to all the friends and family of the mp’s.
Good it might give them the incentive to modernise parliament.
My prediction is they’ll go for the longest and most expensive method of working, having everyone still in the building with the restoration work getting done around the normal government business.
Heaven forbid, our political classes do the sensible thing and leave the place empty for the work tonne done more efficiently, that would be sensible and we don’t do that in Westminster 🙄
At least house some of the priceless artwork elsewhere too until it’s safer
What an 800 year old building is a fire risk? Imagine my shock /s
What about all the tower blocks with dodgy fire cladding??
Spend £20b building a new planned city to host a new Parliament and capital, like Canberra.
It would ba laugh if it catched fire because of maintenance funding cuts.
cool.
left and right would unite to block fire engines from gerting to westminster.