MPs warned of ‘Notre Dame-style fire’ as Parliament repair costs climb
The Palace of Westminster is at risk of a Notre Dame-style fire or a similar catastrophe unless MPs stop delaying its restoration, the Public Accounts Committee has said, with maintenance costs set to reach £2m a week and every year of inaction adding an estimated £420m to the programme. A recent estimate put the full restoration at as much as £40bn over up to six decades. Decisions have been repeatedly delayed amid disagreement over method and spiralling costs.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee’s Conservative chairman, said there had been a “political allergy” to deciding, and asked MPs to consider “global rolling news footage of Notre Dame-like flames licking out of the building’s roof” or “the Chamber being plunged into darkness during the State Opening of Parliament”; these, he said, were not “notional possibilities”. Maintenance of the Grade I-listed Unesco world heritage site now costs £1.5m a week, including 24-hour patrols to avert fire, and is expected to rise to £2m. The committee’s report arrives as Parliament prepares to decide how and when the restoration and renewal programme should begin, a question successive governments have put off since the programme was first proposed. Its central argument is that delay is itself the most expensive option: each year without a decision adds more than the cost of many of the works it defers, while the risk to the building, to those who work in it and to the functioning of Parliament compounds. Expect the restoration vote to become a test of this government’s appetite for unpopular spending.