Big Ben’s clock tower is the unrivalled showpiece of Britain’s parliament. Enveloped by ugly scaffolding in recent years while it underwent an external restoration project, Elizabeth Tower (renamed after the late queen) has just reopened following internal renovation.
But its gleaming condition — with regilded panels and a new coat of Prussian blue paint on the clock dial numerals — belies the sorry state of the old Palace of Westminster. Even newer parts of the estate are crumbling: just this month, rainwater deluged the covered courtyard of Portcullis House, when a pane of glass broke in the atrium’s roof.
Six incidents of falling stonework, 10 fires, and one incident of potential asbestos exposure have been recorded since 2020, while leaking pipes regularly flood politicians’ offices. The prospect of a blaze tearing through the estate remains a serious threat: parliament’s archive, containing acts handwritten on 500-year-old vellum, is being rehoused in Kew.
MPs, however, appear paralysed over how to manage the problem — as they are over so many policies requiring system overhaul or spending commitments that will outlast the current government. Breaking political impasses over the NHS or university funding models, or fundamentally rethinking the pensions system, seem impossible.
Much of the parliamentary estate is over half a century old and its water, electric, sewage and gas infrastructure needs urgent replacement. Proposals range from multibillion-pound options that involve moving MPs and peers off-site, to slower and even more expensive plans to do the work in stages so they can remain in the building. Meg Hillier, Labour chair of the public accounts committee, which scrutinises government spending, laments that the full upgrade has been repeatedly deferred. “It’s what I call ‘slow politics’ — nobody thinks in the long term.”
A board of cross-party MPs and peers, clerks and lay members is now in charge of devising a new shortlist of restoration options and parliament will vote on the final proposal this December. But the issue provokes conflicting and impassioned views. A 2018 vote to move parliamentarians off the estate and get on with the job was scotched last year when the Commons and Lords commissions swooped in to scrap the independent body overseeing the project, accusing it of having acted “in haste”.
In the meantime, doing nothing is not cost neutral. The ad hoc patch-ups already cost the taxpayer £2mn a week. Politicians of all parties fear making a multi-decade, multibillion pound spending commitment at a time when public finances are tight. Even if the Palace of Westminster is a Unesco world heritage site, releasing funds for their own workplace risks looking self-serving.
There is similar timidity elsewhere: England’s social care model and planning system need wholesale reform, yet neither the government nor opposition dare pursue it. Ministers admit privately that local government finance is convoluted and unfair, but memories of Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax disaster discourage reform. Theresa May’s equally doomed plans to transform social care will also cast a long shadow. Such issues tend to be shunted into what former Labour home secretary Charles Clarke called the “too difficult box” and shelved.
The political system is beset by an inertia-crisis paradox. Alice Lilly of the Institute for Government points to net zero ambitions — now being scaled back by the government in the hope of electoral gains — as another victim of this trend. “You get moments where there’s a bit of political will and momentum, but that can quickly slip away because stasis is always easier than major reform,” she says. When crises erupt, the response is “a knee-jerk reaction, rather than longer term, more strategic thinking”, Lilly adds.
A sticking plaster approach to complicated policies and floundering organisations, such as the newly revamped Elizabeth Tower, may appear to mitigate economic and political costs but are in fact a false economy. In the long term, the UK’s most difficult policy challenges face the same prognosis as parliament’s renovation: the bigger the delay, the more tricky and expensive reform becomes. Even physical decay cannot shake politicians out of their inertia.