Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government

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If you need a simple image to stand in for the complexities of Britain’s crumbling infrastructure–and who doesn’t, every hour on the hour?–look no further than Portcullis House, which was built in 2001 as office space for 213 MPs, along with their staff members and (I have to assume) general hangers-on. Already rain is leaking in and panes of glass are dropping from its gloriously dramatic atrium roof.

The original budget for this marvel of architectural longevity was £165 million, although the actual cost was £235 million. But don’t grumble. What’s £70 million between friends? The building was supposed to last for 120 years (or 200 years, according to a different article), so that’s a bargain, right?

Okay, maybe it’s worth a grumble. That works out to roughly £1 million per MP, and the price includes, as a kind of bonus, £440 per MP for reclining chairs (not available to staff and hangers-on) and £150,000 for a dozen or so fig trees that were imported from Florida to grace the atrium–at least until (slight exaggeration alert) they get bashed to bits by falling glass.

On the positive side, anyone’s welcome to enjoy the fig trees. 

The price doesn’t include some £10 million in legal costs over a contract that wasn’t awarded to the lowest bidder.

Irrelevant photo: stormy seas near Bude

Last May, the building needed mechanical and electrical repairs estimated at £143 million. But that’s just a start. A more recent estimate that includes the roof comes in at $235 million. So that’s the same amount as it cost to build, right? 

Possibly. Maybe it’s more, because I’m not sure if the second estimate includes the original £143 million or if it’s in addition. Never let me loose around numbers.

 

Yes, but . . . 

. . . in 2002, the National Audit Office reported that the building had been constructed to a “high standard of architectural design, materials and workmanship,” so you shouldn’t worry about any of this. Such a high standard that in 2018 MPs were already mumbling about lawsuits because of leaks and cracks in the roof. 

Sorry, just found another article: make that 2016. If anything’s happened beyond mumblings and grumblings–you know, anything in the way of actual lawsuits–I can’t found traces of it.

 

But what about the roof?

The atrium roof is the dramatic bit of what’s gone wrong. It’s made of double-glazed panels–basically air sandwiched between two sealed panes of glass. Their goal is to keep the heat in and let the light through, and double-glazed panels aren’t bad at that until they start to leak, which one–or maybe that’s two; it’s all a little murky–did, dumping lots o’ water on the floor many yards below. All across the political spectrum, it was described as a deluge. 

It’s heartening, in our politically divisive climate, that we can still find something to bring political enemies together. 

So far, not much glass has fallen out, but then you don’t need a whole lot of falling glass to make the average person who has to walk underneath it nervous. They’ll be putting up a safety net, just in case.

The problem is that there’s no simple way to get up to the roof. It wasn’t designed with repairs in mind. It was pretty. How much can you expect for £235 million, after all? The only way to inspect it is with a drone and the only way to do maintenance is to send up an abseiling team. Which, predictably, means not a lot of maintenance gets done.

I’m trying to picture a team abseiling with a double-glazed window panel and I can’t do it. They’d end up blown to Buckinghamshire. (It’s a non-metropolitan county, whatever that means.) I suspect any replacement has to involve a crane. And yet more money.   

The roof above the offices is also leaking, and rain’s finding its way into MPs’ offices. On the other hand, the walls and windows are bomb proof. If you want to harm 213 MPs, you’d do better to use a rainstorm than a bomb.

 

Wait–we’ve lost track of Westminster Palace, and it was in the headline

If those 213 MPs weren’t housed in Portcullis House, they would (I think) be in Westminster Palace, where both the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It’s positively overloaded with history. It’s also overloaded with leaks, mice, and fire hazards. The pipework is so complicated and interwoven that the pipes can only be patched, not replaced. The heating stays on because the folks in charge aren’t sure they could restart the system if they once turned it off.

And did I mention asbestos? It’s full of asbestos. And electrical plugs that spark and fizz. Toilets leak–at least one of them into an MP’s office–and I have it on good authority that this is worse than rain. A fire patrol is on duty 24 hours a day–and needs to be. Between 2007 and 2017, they had 60 small fires. 

In 2018, a stone angel on the outside of the building dropped a chunk of masonry the size of a football onto the ground. In 2022, an exclusion zone was set up.

So why doesn’t the building get fixed or replaced? It’ll be expensive. And everyone will either have to move out for a while, which some number of traditionalist MPs resist, or the repairs will have to be done while government totters on around it, making the repairs both slower and more expensive. A specially convened committee recommended moving everyone out. So far, the recommendation has been ignored.

Both choices are problematic, so the only sensible alternative is to do nothing, which costs an estimated £2 million a week.

I’ve seen various estimates for how much a full slate of repairs will cost, including £3.6 billion, £13 billion, and between £9.5 billion and £18.5 billion. So what the hell, make up a number. Construction never comes in at the estimated cost anyway. 

If you want links for all those estimates, sorry, I’m bored. Look them up yourself.

A cross-party committee–possibly the same one whose recommendations about moving out while the building’s repaired are being ignored–said there was “a real and rising risk” that “a catastrophic event will destroy the Palace.” Possibly from an angel hurling something worse than a stone football. 

The thing is, schools and hospitals around the country are genuinely falling apart–that’s what I meant about the infrastructure crumbling, and it comes without an exaggeration warning. The buildings most recently in the headlines were constructed on the cheap with a particular kind of concrete that’s now past its use-by date. In the face of that, it’s hard for a government to let itself be caught committing however many billion pounds into for repairs at Westminster. 

But even before the latest crumbling schools and hospitals became public knowledge, no government, no party, no nobody wanted to be associated with the outrageous expense of fixing the building. The rest of the country–schools, the National Health Service, local government, and oh, so much more–are being squeezed by austerity, a political word that means We’re shrinking your budget and don’t much care what sort of problems that creates becasue it’ll look like your fault. So again, a few billion pounds to fix the seat of government isn’t a good look.

Neither is the money that subsidizes food and booze for MPs and Lords at Westminster, but that’s less public, not to mention a slow drip as opposed to a deluge, so they continue. One theory holds that some of the traditionalists don’t want to move out of Westminster Palace for repairs because the subsidies wouldn’t move with them.

So before any serious repairs are undertaken, that angel’s going to have to drop something more dramatic than a stone football. And have excellent aim.

45 thoughts on “Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government”

  3. I worked in public sector procurement for 17 years and I can’t help feeling that standards have slipped a little since then. “It won’t need repairs” sounds a lot to me like “It will never sink” and we know how that ended.

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    • My mind keeps bouncing back to the introduction of austerity, when the slogan of the day was “Do more with less.” And they have–more damage. It won’t need repairs. We can get another ten or twenty years out of the schools and hospitals built with aerated concrete. It won’t sink. It will never sink.

      Why are my feet wet?

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    • If you look closer, I think the sky’s the limit when spending OPM on things that benefit themselves or people they recognize as being like themselves. If we’re talking about people who fall in the Other category, then no, it’s all about making do with less. And although I didn’t follow the details of Thatcher’s career, I suspect that was as true then as it is now. Austerity for the masses and subsidized champagne for the House of Lords. (Yes, it really is subsidized.)

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  5. A barge on the coast? I think we could fit 213 MPs in one of those, and the last one only cost about £1.6 billion. We could save a bit by scrimping on the moorings too – they’re usually over-engineered.

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  6. When I saw the title of the post I blithely assumed that Portcullis House – with a name like that – was as old as Westminster Palace. Surprising that a new building would be so awful…until I recalled all the buildings I have worked in where the new additions had leaky roofs, heating units that didn’t work properly and windows that didn’t offer ventilation. Of course those of us working in the old parts of the building had the same problems, but that was to be expected. Being public schools, the taxpayers were paying for these projects too. (and I was one of those taxpayers.)
    Is there a Portcullis at Portcullis House, or did they just name it that to make it sound historical ??

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  7. Canada’s Parliament Buildings have been undergoing expensive ($3 billion, Canadian dollars I assume) renos for years. But our prime minister’s official residence (24 Sussex Drive in Ottawa) is uninhabited except by rats while a decision is being mulled about what to do with it. Whatever is done will no doubt be expensive. Meanwhile, the PM is living in a “cottage” on the grounds of the Governor General’s mansion.

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  8. You forget to mention that their bars and restaurants are subsidised by the taxpayer. I went to Westiminster and Portcullis House to meet seven different MPs about the closure of tax offices in their constituencies in 2012, Only one offered me refreshment – which involved walking though an underground passage connecting the two buildings – in the cafe in the atrium. Thank goodness it wasn’t raining. And the tea – from memory – cost 50p – though I didn’t pay.

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  9. At least Westminster has the excuse of being old. I wonder if anyone would notice if they just closed the government for a few months and did the repairs? Of course, then you’d have to deal with all those politicians roaming the countryside.

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  10. Guy Fawkes, for all his, let’s call ’em ‘personality quirks’, had the right idea, pathetic execution, but the right idea.
    Do you think that if enough rain poured in some of the ‘rats’ might get themselves drownded?

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    • I wouldn’t count on it. They’re known for leaving sinking ships. As for Guy Fawkes, I don’t have a lot of faith anymore (if I ever did) in demolition as a political solution. It is, surely, necessary, but without a plan we just get idiots wrecking things. Mind you, I have no illusion anymore about knowing what the solution is. All I know is that we need one.

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  12. Somehow toilet water leaking into an office seems like a good metaphor for the current state of British politics.

    Given it was finished in 2001 and these projects typically take 10+ years to actually go from concept to reality Incan only assume the new offices were all done under the careful eye of the Major admin?

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    • Good metaphor. The thing about metaphors is that they don’t cost much (although I could put together an argument that this one did; never mind, let’s just go on and ignore that). The Major administration? Could be. I’m going to smile vaguely and take your word for it. I didn’t follow British politics in anything deeply–or even particularly shallowly–at that point, so I don’t know much about how things were working then.

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  13. This “salami tactics” regarding the price is a common approach. Like when you want to build a subterranean railway station, the first quotation says e.g. 3.8 billion (1998). Two years later some unforeseen obstacles are met, so it’s 4. After more than twenty years (in 2023) we are at more than 11 billion €. Some companies (and hence their managers) are very rich now.
    The same goes for other “mega projects” here over the last years.

    Accident ? We think not !

    Westminster (where is the Eastminster btw ?) should be overhauled completely. And for this term all those mps and their lobbyists should be forced to use some old barracks, there surely are enough around. Who refuses gets disqualified – if it’s good enough for troops, its good enough for braggards of all colours. Wouldn’t harm German mps too.

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    • There is no Eastminster, but if memory serves (and it often doesn’t–I have a terrible memory, so don’t rely too heavily on this) there was an original minster, which Westminster was–no surprise here–west of. I can’t remember what happened to it or if it’s still standing. Similarly, although there’s a Wessex (west), a Sussex (south), and an Essex (east), there is no Nosex, much to the disappointment of giggling twelve-year-olds (and adults).

      You’re so right about all those mega projects–and of course we have to add inflation into the calculations too. For all they’re worth, the original cost estimates might as well be done by someone as mathematically illiterate as I am. As for a working space for government, I’d suggest the dismal places they’re forcing refugees to live in. If it’s good enough for people who’ve crossed Europe fleeing for their lives, it’s good enough for people pretending to run the country. They might come to understand a few things better after the experience.

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  15. Yes Portcullis House was extremely expensive, but you omitted to mention it’s basically a multi-level underground station with some offices on top – my favourite architecture of the London Underground is the route down to the Jubilee line.

    David Anderson

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