Restoring the Palace of Westminster could cost ‘eye-watering’ £40bn

Plans to restore the crumbling Palace of Westminster could cost £40bn and take up to 61 years, a report by the body set up to investigate how the project should be handled has found.Critics labelled the cost as “eye-watering” and said the project lacked accountability.MPs and peers will have to choose between two new plans drawn up by the restoration and renewal client board, instead of the four previously mooted.The first would involve a “full decant” in which the House of Commons and the House of Lords would move out of the Palace of Westminster’s Northern Estate – outside the palace but close by – and the Lords to the nearby QEII conference centre from 2032. The board estimates this option would last 19 to 24 years and cost up to £15.6bn.A “staged decant”, which would vacate the House of Lords for between 8 and 13 years while the Commons would move to the Lords Chamber for up to two years, would take 38 to 61 years and cost up to £39.2bn.MPs and peers have also been asked to agree to the initial £3bn restoration works at the Houses of Parliament, which would include refurbishing the inside of the Victoria Tower, building a jetty on the Thames for deliveries by river and commencement of underground tunnel shafts. The works would last seven years, and could start in 2026 if approved. The board will then ask them to choose between the final two options by mid-2030.MPs, peers and senior parliamentary officials are divided on the best way to carry out urgently needed reparation works to the mainly Victorian building, despite widespread misgivings that ancient wiring, asbestos and unsafe masonry could result in a catastrophic incident at the Unesco Westminster world heritage site.The House of Lords has frequent heating failures, problems with its sewerage system and forced closure of toilets because of the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). Since 2016, there have been 36 fire incidents, 12 asbestos incidents and 19 stonemasonry incidents on the estate.The report from the restoration board argues that the state of the Palace of Westminster has become critical, with £1.5m spent every week on maintenance and repairs. The number of maintenance jobs increased by 70% between 2021 and 2024.But the shadow speaker of the house, Jesse Norman, warned that despite more than a decade of delays, key decisions were being made behind closed doors with no individual or body held responsible for a budget “more appropriate to HS2 than to parliament”.“The costed proposals report is asking parliamentarians to approve eye-watering expenditures […] on a project with unclear governance, limited scrutiny and low confidence of effective project or cost management,” he said.Norman, a member of the House of Commons commission, which is responsible for the palace’s maintenance, wrote to the board in December and criticised a proposal for a new three-board structure to oversee the project.“It is not hard to see how this could increase bureaucracy, delay, dispersion of responsibility and confusion,” he said.