What does £450 million get you these days? With that cash, you could buy a Premier League football club. Or fund 10,000 nurses for a year. If you’re feeling civic-minded, why not give everyone in the UK a fiver and have a chunk of change left over?

In the case of the Parliamentary Restoration and Renewal (R&R) programme – the plans to rebuild and repair the Palace of Westminster – the best part of £500 million has been spent on, well, it’s quite hard to tell. MPs and peers have batted ideas back and forth about how to fix their grade I-listed, Unesco World Heritage workplace for more than two decades.

‘We’re sleepwalking into a Notre-Dame-style inferno’

‘We’re sleepwalking into a Notre-Dame-style inferno’

Meanwhile, parliament crumbles. No significant works have been done on Charles Barry’s 1834 design since it was rebuilt after the Blitz, and its age is showing. The steam-powered heating frequently breaks down. The sewage system leaks. Vermin are commonplace. Fourteen miles of water pipes and roughly 250 miles of cabling snaggle through its 1,100 rooms. The Palace – and I felt a perverse lift of national pride on learning this – has the most asbestos of any building in Europe. Ongoing maintenance costs £1.5 million a week, and it is barely keeping the lights on: since 2016, there have been 36 fires and 19 instances of falling stonemasonry. In 2019, a House of Commons debate was suspended when water began to pour from the ceiling.

‘We’re sleepwalking into a Notre-Dame-style inferno,’ says Peter Hain, a former leader of the House of Commons. ‘Six thousand people work in parliament, and every single one of us is vulnerable. It’s a much-respected, beloved centre of democracy that’s exalted throughout the world – and yet it’s unfit for purpose. If it burns down, the public are going to turn on parliamentarians and ask: “What were you doing?”’ Another insider was more blunt:  the ongoing saga of R&R was a scandal ‘another HS2 in the making’.

You don’t have to spend long in the Palace to realise the buildings are in a dire state. On a recent behind-the-scenes tour, we were issued with hard hats and told to wear sensible shoes. Stepping through a scuffed and scarred wooden door, we descended into the basement, a restricted area described by one peer as ‘a cathedral of horror’.

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