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.