London : The planned procurement for renewal works to Parliament will be delayed, at a cost of millions, unless MPs and lords debate the proposals before conference season, according to officials running the scheme.
In December, Sir Alan Campbell, Leader of the House of Commons, confirmed that a motion would be brought forward to discuss the Restoration and Renewal Client Board report that was subsequently published in February.
However, Chloe Mawson, accounting officer for the House of Lords, told a committee yesterday (29 April) that plans to start procurement for preparatory works in the autumn will be impossible without Parliamentary votes on the report.
She said: “The schedule set out in the cost of proposal report remains deliverable if the debates are before the summer recess, but if they slip to the September sitting or after the conference recess, that will have impacts on the programme schedule.
“And obviously the later the debates, the higher that impact is going to be in terms of House of Lords temporary accommodation.
“If the debates don’t take place till after the conference recess, that really does have quite a significant impact on our temporary accommodation schedule.”
She reiterated the client board report’s estimate that every year that the procurement is delayed costs the taxpayer £70m plus inflation.
Russ MacMillan, chief executive of the Palace of Westminster Restoration and Renewal Delivery Authority, told the committee: “We’ll be ready to go this side of the summer, and if the vote comes late, then we would have to delay that activity, with the consequential knock-ons that Chloe talked about.”
Committee member Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court probed the witnesses on why the budget for procurement had risen from £5.5m to £8m.
MacMillan said that the cash was being spent on a mix of in-house staff, specialist procurement capability and external legal support.
“There is the procurement of the House Lords temporary accommodation design-and-build contractor. There’s up to three different procurements for the palace.
“They are among the largest construction contracts you would see in a UK setting, and we want to get it right, and we want to mitigate another very significant risk of the programme, which is the risk of a procurement challenge.”
In April 2024, Construction News revealed that work to repair parliament’s tallest structure, the Victoria Tower, had been delayed due to a botched procurement process.
At the end of the hearing, committee chair Nusrat Ghani said that the committee had been “unsettled” by a letter sent earlier in the day by the chief secretary to the Treasury James Murray.
Addressing the clerk of the House of Commons Tom Goldsmith, she said: “You’ve said, for the record, that you think… the budget is taut and realistic. That’s the level of confidence we were hoping to get out of the Treasury, and we didn’t get it.
“And it was our second attempt to get that confidence out of the Treasury. We are unsettled by the fact that they couldn’t commit the way they have done in previous years.”
However, Goldsmith said: “I read the letter literally, as the chief secretary saying he doesn’t think this is something the Treasury should be saying, regardless of the fact that his predecessors have.
“It’s something that the accounting officers have to assure themselves of and I have assured myself of that.
