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Intro: [00:00:00] You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And coming up this week.

Ruth Fox: Power, plutocracy, pimping and peerages.

Mark D'Arcy: Should there be a way to defrock errant peers?

Ruth Fox: And groundhog day in the ongoing saga of how and when to save Parliament's crumbling buildings.

Mark D'Arcy: And Ruth, what a week it's been. This has been the week so far of Peter Mandelson in Parliament, and not in a good way. Peter Mandelson, the twice resigned cabinet minister, forced to resign again as [00:01:00] Britain's Ambassador to Washington. Let me correct myself. He didn't resign for the third time. He was in fact sacked, but there's three top level jobs that he's lost during his long career.

Peter Mandelson has been causing all sorts of difficulties for Sir Keir Starmer's government. Should they have appointed someone who turned out to have close links to the paedophile and financier, Jeffrey Epstein. Should he have been more closely scrutinised? Should he not have been given the job at all? What did Sir Keir Starmer know about his relationship with Epstein and when did he know it?

Those questions looked like doing some quite serious damage to the Prime Minister. He endured a dreadful Prime Minister's Question Time on Wednesday. He's visibly shaking at various points during it. He was facing very well-directed questions from Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition, and you could almost see the confidence melting away on the Labour benches.

So an awful week thus far for the government and things aren't over yet. We're recording this on a Thursday. Who knows what developments may yet unfold. [00:02:00] But the worst part of it for the government in many ways was the debate that followed that Prime Minister's Question Time.

And that was a debate on a humble address. And this was a parliamentary device to try and extract the documents around Peter Mandelson's vetting for the post of Ambassador to Washington. And I think the first question we gotta deal with for aficionados of parliamentary procedures. What is a humble address?

Ruth Fox: As it happens, Mark, one of our listeners, Kai O'Neill, emailed me yesterday with exactly that question.

So Kai said the Mandelson document request has been submitted as a humble address. What is this? And how has this procedure evolved? He goes on to say, by the by, cheers for the podcast. I suspect more of your listeners are my age, late teens, than you'd expect. Great, thank you Kai for listening and for your question. We'll try and answer it.

So essentially Mark, a humble address is a formal communication from either House of Parliament to the Monarch. Each House has the power to call [00:03:00] for the production of papers by means of a motion for a return, as it's called also, but it's known as a humble address, which sounds a little bit obsequious, doesn't it?

Mark D'Arcy: You're right.

Ruth Fox: But yeah, is this a dragging of the King into politics? No. The reason why it's referred to in these terms is it refers to the Monarch because government departments are created by Royal Prerogative. So if you like, they're effectively a branch of the Privy Council in constitutional terms, and that power to call for papers from the Department means that you therefore call on the Monarch. Until the mid 19th century, they were used quite regularly. You'd often see humble addresses to get papers out of the Government. It tended to fall out of disuse and it resurrected a bit during Brexit. I think it was used 20 times in about five or six years during the Brexit period.

Mark D'Arcy: I have post-traumatic memories, and of course it's worth remembering who made humble addresses.

Again, it was a certain Keir Starmer indeed when he was the shadow Brexit Secretary all those years ago [00:04:00] when Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader.

Ruth Fox: One reason it fell out of use was because the kinds of papers that were often being called for were more regularly published upfront by the government, so they didn't need to be called for.

You see your humble address in two forms really. The first is the government makes an unopposed return itself, puts a motion on the order paper, a humble address. There's actually one on the order paper today as it happens from the Transport Secretary, Heidi Alexander, in which she calls for a humble address be presented to the House to enable the Cranston inquiry report, which is a report of a public inquiry to be published.

And the reason that the government does that, particularly for public inquiry reports, is to ensure that they've got parliamentary privilege. So that's one form of use that's used reasonably regularly.

The second form, which, it's non-government MPs, in this case, Kemi Badenoch's, and the opposition, Conservative opposition, calling on the government, demanding papers or [00:05:00] information has been used much less regularly.

And part of the reason for that, of course, is it's binding on the government. They must provide the papers that are called for.

Mark D'Arcy: And that was one of the things that was discovered when this procedure came back into use during the Brexit years. This was a kind of parliamentary can opener. This forced ministers to disclose documents.

There are all sorts of documents that have been disclosed in this way over the years. I think there was the impact assessment on the effect of Brexit and the government's proposals for Brexit was one of the big examples. I think there's the vetting report on Lord Lebedev, the son of a former KGB agent who became a peer.

Ruth Fox: Yep.

Mark D'Arcy: So there are a number of interesting uses and usually the opposition is looking for something that they know is gonna hurt, embarrass, and generally damage the government of the day. So it's a procedure that often requires government MPs to turn around and vote for it. And one of the difficulties for Starmer on this occasion was that it seemed that quite a lot of Labour MPs were [00:06:00] sufficiently angry about the whole tangled Mandelson affair that they were going to be prepared to vote for an opposition motion. Now, the government did have, on this occasion, an amendment down in which it would try and get a national security exemption to the information that could be published through the humble address. And they were proposing that the Cabinet Secretary, the most senior civil servant in the land, should go through these papers and make sure that nothing damaging was revealed about intelligence sources or Britain's negotiating position in trade talks or whatever it was. That got people rather sniffing suspiciously at the idea that this might be an instrument for covering up the really embarrassing gory details of Peter Mandelson's vetting.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and I think this has something to do with the way in which the Mandelson appointment was done, because of course he was appointed as an ambassador, but he wasn't appointed through the Foreign Office or the Foreign Secretary.

It wasn't a direct foreign service, if you like, appointment. It was a political appointment made by the Prime Minister and therefore in effect through the [00:07:00] Cabinet Office. And the Cabinet Secretary had been involved in the process of the appointment. To what degree? It's a bit unclear, but he'd been involved in the background security and vetting process, and he gave evidence just before Christmas to the Foreign Affairs Committee about this process soon after Peter Mandelson had been forced out of Washington.

So there were concerns, I think, that although they weren't calling into question his integrity, there were concerns that somebody who'd been part of that process shouldn't be then deciding what papers were going to be passed on.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. You can't be marking your own homework, so to speak. Of course, in the US Congress, I think I'm right in saying ambassadors can be confirmed by congressional committees.

So there's a process of parliamentary oversight, congressional oversight, over there that we don't have over here. Appointments are just made on the say so of the Prime Minister. And one of the interesting questions is the extent to which Sir Keir Starmer may have just overridden advice that, steady on a minute, this could be a rather dangerous appointment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and, interestingly, if you recall when Peter Mandelson was first [00:08:00] appointed, so this would be what, December 2024, I think the Foreign Affairs Committee under the chairmanship of Emily Thornberry actually called on him to come to the committee to give evidence about his appointment, and that was declined.

The argument was it would be inappropriate for an ambassador who'd not yet taken post to give evidence while the current incumbent was still in place.

Mark D'Arcy: And it's too late after it had taken place.

Ruth Fox: And then the argument was, perhaps he could come in a few weeks, a few months, and of course he never did.

And certainly the Foreign Affairs Committee I think was pretty unhappy about that.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. So the government had this amendment down, a lot of people were extremely suspicious of it, and what you got was then something quite rare in parliamentary proceedings, something that needs the permission of the Speaker in effect, which is a manuscript amendment.

This is literally a handwritten amendment to the amendment changing the terms of the humble address and the idea in this particular case was that instead of having the Cabinet Secretary deciding what could be [00:09:00] released and what couldn't be released, that decision should be taken by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament.

Now, this is a joint committee of MPs and peers that very rarely meets in public that is there to oversee the work of the intelligence services. It's chaired by a former Labour defence minister, Lord Beamish, formerly known as Kevan Jones MP, and it's in effect a mechanism for trying to build up some parliamentary trust about the activities of the intelligence service.

So it's almost the logical body to evaluate, if you like, national security implications of these documents.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and it was interesting, if you watch the debate, the proposal for the Intelligence and Security Committee to provide some oversight of this process was clearly percolating. And then Angela Rayner, Meg Hillier and others come in with this idea quite firmly in their speeches.

And, you couldn't see it on the TV screens watching it online, but apparently your former colleagues in the press gallery could, that there were little groups behind the speaker's chair meeting, including the Leader of the House, Chief Whip, Meg [00:10:00] Hillier, Angela Rayner, Conservative Chief Whip, I think clearly discussing what was gonna have to be done.

Because the Government at that point, early on, clearly their amendment was not gonna wash. They were not gonna be able to carry their own troops if there was a vote.

Mark D'Arcy: And that was pretty telling when the government can't command its own troops with such a vast majority in the House of Commons as well.

This clearly spells big trouble and speaks of a lot of Labour MPs being extraordinarily unhappy at this turn of events.

Ruth Fox: I thought it was an important day for the House of Commons because the moral authority of the Prime Minister was almost visibly draining away during the debate. And here you had backbenchers on both sides of the House, cooperating, constructive in their approach, the opposition MPs, they didn't ignore or think that the national security and international relations arguments were unimportant, they just wanted a process to ensure that wasn't a get out for a coverup. Yeah, and likewise, the Labour MPs also understood that, but felt that [00:11:00] they couldn't be party to anything either, that could look like a coverup. And so there was this sort of almost constructive effort across the chamber to try and come up with a solution that then found its way into this manuscript amendment, which is in effect, an amendment without notice.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not usual for the Speaker to allow this, but the speaker's job in a way is to allow the House to get to where it wants to be.

And so on this occasion, he gave license for people to cobble together a solution which actually worked and got the House to where it wanted to be. And lo, there they are. I don't think they even came to a vote in the end. So it's not a recorded vote, it was just on the voices. There were allowed enough shouts of Aye that the motion went through.

And what happens now is that the physical copies of those documents will go to the Intelligence and Security Committee who will need a safe to lock them all up in and a secure room. Well, I should imagine there's quite a load. Because you are looking at, lorry loads of documents, presumably, [00:12:00] and huge printouts of long email chains with lots of out of office messages on them and that kind of thing.

Ruth Fox: And it's just worth considering what the opposition have asked for in this humble address. To ask the government to lay before this House, all papers relating to Lord Mandelson's appointment as ambassador, including, but not confined to, and I won't read the list 'cause we'll take up too much time. Listeners can look it up and we'll include a link in the show notes. But I've divided up in my notes to nine categories of, minutes, due diligence forms, vetting and security forms, electronic communications. Now, does that include WhatsApps? Does that include all emails? Which ministers are covered? Who was involved? How many advisors, special advisors, are we talking about? Was there also communications, presumably, with the security services, the American Embassy, our embassy in Washington. It potentially is enormous. And that important phrase including but not confined to these categories. So it's a [00:13:00] pretty broad brush and it's going to be a challenge for the government to pull it all together.

Mark D'Arcy: Clearly an enormous amount of material to wade through and actually the ISC has now sent a letter to the Prime Minister explaining how it thinks the process should work and the steps are that it's for the Cabinet Secretary and the Cabinet Office to identify the kind of the whole universe of relevant documents that are to be laid before Parliament.

And within that it's for the Cabinet Secretary to identify the documents that he thinks are problematic, that he doesn't think should be published for national security reasons, or international relations, international trade or international relations reasons, whatever it is. So it is, it's quite a detailed process, but what doesn't happen within it is that the ISC doesn't have to go through every single document in this universe. Only the ones where the red flag goes up.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. They said that the information should be provided to the ISC in unredacted form. But if the government thinks that it should be withheld, then they have to explain why. And it may not be the whole document. It may be words, [00:14:00] phrases, sentences, paragraphs, they have to

Mark D'Arcy: Couple of names.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. They have to identify explicitly what they want redacted and why. The committee will then consider it. And they've got the option of, whether or not they decide that they want to report on those documents or individual documents or not.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. And sight unseen, it's very difficult for them to say much more than that 'cause they literally dunno what's in the documents that the Cabinet Secretary might wish to withhold.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And they make clear they don't know the volume of the task either. But interestingly, the ISC is not a Select Committee of Parliament, it's a Committee of Parliament set up under statute, under an Act of Parliament. I think it's the Crime and Justice Act 2013, and the arrangements it has about what it can publish and how is set out in, partly in the Act and partly in the memorandum of understanding with the government. And ultimately the Prime Minister has considerable decision making powers over this.

Mark D'Arcy: They've already been roused about the Prime Minister not allowing the publication and famous Russia report, [00:15:00] for example.

Ruth Fox: And I thought it was interesting that Kevan Jones, that the chair, Lord Beamish, he's in the House of Lords, so he wasn't part of the debate, but the most senior MP on the committee, Sir Jeremy Wright, the former Attorney General, he was very quick in the debate yesterday to press the government minister. Can the committee have more resources or will you commit that we will have more resources in order to do this job. And again, its resources come from the government.

Mark D'Arcy: It speaks to just the vast volume of material that people will have to go through. And what happens then? I've spoken to MPs who think that the next step ought to be a joint committee of the Commons and the Lords to examine the allegations against Lord Mandelson.

And that could take quite a while to set up and go through all this material as well. Potentially a police investigation going on. We don't know quite yet what format might take.

Ruth Fox: And that also complicates the issue of the papers because of course yesterday the Prime Minister confirmed that Downing Street had been contacted by the Metropolitan Police saying that they didn't want certain [00:16:00] papers published. Because it was germane to their investigations. So that is another complicating factor that the Intelligence and Security Committee is gonna have to take account of. And there were questions yesterday about certainly the Minister attempted to say that certain things shouldn't be discussed because Lord Mandelson is under investigation.

The Speaker was very quick to get in that actually Metropolitan Police had not contacted him as Speaker and that Lord Mandelson had not been charged and therefore the sub judice rule, which restricts what can be said about a live criminal charge did not yet apply and may never apply.

Mark D'Arcy: There's no actual criminal charge, at least as yet. And I suppose there's another complication here, about the potential for criminal charges, a criminal trial, which is that an awful lot has been said from the despatch box of the House of Commons about Peter Mandelson that, I'm sure his lawyers will attempt to argue at least, is prejudicial, that he couldn't get a fair trial in this country because of all that's been said.

Ruth Fox: The police are [00:17:00] investigating misconduct in public office and I'm no legal expert, Mark, so I don't know the whys and wherefores of how that would work, but clearly on the face of the limited number of emails we've seen so far, and there may be an awful lot more to come, it looks pretty serious.

And if it doesn't give rise to misconduct in public office, you wonder as a lay person what would, but setting that aside, if, and it's a big if, he were to be charged with misconduct in public office, the Prime Minister at the despatch box yesterday, essentially described his behavior as traitorous to the country, traitorous to Parliament, traitorous to his party.

One of his successors as the MP for Hartlepool. I think it's Jonathan Brash, the Labour MP, essentially said in the chamber, he's undoubtedly a traitor. That is pretty difficult when you think about getting a fair trial. This has been all over the media and it is one of the difficulties of investigating these issues in public life.

Mark D'Arcy: It's an inherent tension, isn't it? Because how can they not [00:18:00] talk about this under the current circumstances and if they're talking about it in such anodine terms that they're not allowed to actually say anything or cross any judgements on the kind of conduct. What's the point of even attempting to talk about it?

So it happens a lot. Normally the Commons and the courts try not to tread on each other's toes.

Ruth Fox: Quite a term though, isn't it, to accuse somebody of being a traitor. Keir Starmer is a former Director of Public Prosecutions, so it's,

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, he should know what he's doing.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it's a very emotion laden phrase.

Mark D'Arcy: Who knows what the various processes now in train are going to generate. But what we do know is that the government is now attempting to remove Lord Mandelson's peerage. He's already said that he's going to retire from the House of Lords. That was announced by the Lord Speaker from the woolsack on Tuesday. And that retirement took place on Wednesday, but that still means he can call himself a Lord. The peerage is still there. Even if the seat in the House of Lords is no longer there. That of course is quite a difficult business. Removing a peerage requires quite a constitutional back flip.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. that's again, it's [00:19:00] quite complicated. So shall we come back in a few minutes, Mark. Let's take a quick break, come back to discuss that and go through the legislative complications of how Lord Mandelson might be reduced back to Peter Mandelson. See you in a minute.

Mark D'Arcy: And we are back and Ruth, let's look at that question of how you actually take away a peerage. There is a little bit of legislation here and there that enables various things to be done to peers. If you go back more than a hundred years now, the Deprivation of Titles Act in 1917 was passed during the First World War because there were descendants of Queen Victoria who were German princes who were fighting on the other side, but could potentially have been British peers and even taken seats in the House of Lords.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Ultimately, a peerage is an honor conferred by the Crown. Once given, it can't easily be undone. So it requires an Act of Parliament and as you say, 1917, it was done in relation to four specific peers.

And this is the interesting question about how the Government is going to approach [00:20:00] this. So we've had slightly different messaging from different ministers. Keir Starmer has said that there would be legislation to strip Lord Mandelson of his peerage, but that would also be legislation to enable the peerages generally, where this kind of example occurs in the future, to be stripped. So without that need for separate legislation for individuals.

Mark D'Arcy: Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, in a little bit of whataboutery really managed to name check Baroness Mone on that subject, and said that a process was clearly needed to remove peerages that you didn't have to do the full all singing, all dancing specific parliamentary bill for each possible instance.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And then there's been sort of question of this might be pitch back to the House of Lords for them to consider what the arrangement should be and whether it can be handled within the Lords. Certainly the position at the moment is that if you want to strip a peerage title, you're going to need legislation.

So what are the different approaches that they might take? On the one hand, you might say, if we just deal [00:21:00] with stripping Lord Mandelson individually of his title. One approach could be a personal bill, which is a rare thing. The last time we had one was 1987, and one of the ways that those bills are used are to deal with styles and titles, which is why you might think that might be an option. But in fact, that's a form of Private Bill, not a public bill, not a government bill, and it requires somebody to petition Parliament for the bill, and there's a select committee that has to be set up to consider the petitions and so on. It would be very odd for the Government to be petitioning Parliament in order to bring in a Bill. So I think having consulted retired clerks and other experts, I'm pretty sure that's not going to be the route that will be used.

So you're then into, if it's a government bill, okay, you introduce it as a public bill, but because it would be targeted at Lord Mandelson, assuming they specifically name him, then it deals with a private [00:22:00] interest, it treats him differently to any other peer or to any other member of the public. He's targeted.

Mark D'Arcy: Oh my lord. It's a hybrid bill.

Ruth Fox: It's a hybrid bill. Yes, exactly. We talked about those in the podcast in the past, but usually in the context of infrastructure bills like HS2 and the private interest being treated differently if you live on the railway line. Now anybody who's listened to our discussions in the past about things like HS2 or Crossrail and so on, you have to have a select committee set up, especially to listen to the petitioners on it.

I don't think that will be an issue this time because I can only see Lord Mandelson being somebody who could legitimately petition the committee. And I guess this is the question, what is the view of Lord Mandelson on all of these issues?

Mark D'Arcy: Would he rather just keep his head down and get it all over with?

Ruth Fox: At some point in this process, does he decide actually he's gonna put his head above the parapet and actually defend himself?

Mark D'Arcy: You can imagine the spectacle.

Ruth Fox: I want a platform.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. The committee meets for the Peter Mandelson brackets Head on a Pike close [00:23:00] bracket Bill, and he's there fighting his corner.

That seems unlikely, but you know, he might have some pretty pungent things to say about Sir Keir Starmer, and it's worth remembering that during one of his sackings, he conducted quite a guerilla campaign against Tony Blair for the circumstances in which he had been removed from the cabinet for I think the second time.

The author Robert Harris was one of those batting for him very strongly at that point. He's someone who's certainly capable of fighting a considerable rear guard action. Indeed, he was fighting one until the latest release from the Epstein Papers broke. He was starting to do, as it were, comeback interviews with Laura Kuennsberg and others.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, so who knows, but let's assume that he wouldn't contest it and wouldn't want to petition the House. I can't see that anybody else would have standing to do so. It's possible that either the committee would have to be set up, but nothing would happen with it, and you just move on to the normal legislative stages.

Or it's possible that the Government would be able to move a motion to set aside the petitioning [00:24:00] process because there's nobody who wants to petition. So actually, in practice, although we normally say hybrid bills are the most complicated and most long-winded way of legislating in this case, I think they could probably dispatch it quite quickly.

Mark D'Arcy: Yes. As you say, there's a limited number of people who actually have a petitionable interest in this. Basically, Peter Mandelson or that's it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But again, would there be the potential, or at least the effort, to try and amend it, to add names to it?

And there, I think, you get into discussions of what's the short and long title and what's the scope.

Mark D'Arcy: And would someone try and find a mechanism to add the name of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, for example.

Ruth Fox: Yes. There's all sorts of possibilities, in that direction, but it will come down to judgments on scope for what's possible and what's not. Theoretically, it could be relatively quick and probably could get through the Commons in a day. I would've thought the Lords might want a couple

Mark D'Arcy: Easily.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And then there's the question, okay, that could deal with Lord Mandelson specifically, but then this broader question of how you deal with [00:25:00] stripping peerages generally, so this power exists and we don't have to have this debate again.

Mark D'Arcy: It's rather cumbersome to have to do this specifically for each individual, so you can see why it might be sensible to have a process where, when this kind of problem arises, you don't have to go through a full parliamentary process every time.

And that's fair enough. I just suggest though that maybe the mirror image point applies. If you're gonna have due process to remove peers, maybe you need a bit of due process to appoint them in the first place. Because there are a number of people in the House of Lords whose position there is at least questionable.

I've got great respect for most members of the House of Lords. Most members of the House of Lords do a good job and work very hard and diligently scrutinise legislation, et cetera, et cetera. But I don't think their position is helped by having a number of people out there whose place in our legislature is highly questionable and seems to have been the result of a bit of political favour trading to put it [00:26:00] at its gentlest.

Ruth Fox: We are gonna have a committee for retirement and participation that will look at some of these issues and whether you can actually get some of these individuals out of the House of Lords. And there've been options for that. But you can take them out of the House of Lords. But they still got their peerage title.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: And that's what essentially we're talking about here. Lord Mandelson retired from the House of Lords, but he's still Lord Mandelson and that's the bit that can't be stripped.

Mark D'Arcy: Take the magic word, Lord, away.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and what you're talking about is a government bill to provide a general power or powers to revoke peerages in particular circumstances.

So what are the circumstances? How do you define that? What are the limitations on it? Who decides? Is that the government decides? Is that a House of Lords Committee decides? Is that a joint committee of both Houses decides? Who exercises the power?

And one thing, how do you prevent misuse?

Mark D'Arcy: And the one thing you absolutely don't want is a process where it becomes easy to remove a Member of Parliament, be that an MP in the Commons, or a peer in the House of [00:27:00] Lords, because that's a tool that a more unscrupulous government would use with alacrity to just get its political enemies out of Westminster altogether. And sometimes you need the awkward squad in there and you don't want them to be easily removable.

You've only gotta look across the Atlantic at the moment to see how dangerous it can be.

Ruth Fox: I think this bill could be the more complex legislative minefield, constitutional minefield field, actually. And that ought to take some thought. I hope the government doesn't think that it just brushes that through in a day. That way could be very difficult.

In the meantime, or as an alternative, of course, there is that royal slight of hand that we saw with Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, which is to remove the title from the roll of the Peerage.

The King essentially then removed his brother's peerage title by Royal Warrant to take it off the roll of the Peerage. So what is that? It's essentially, a roll is kept of peers whose titles have been officially recognized and they're referred to in official [00:28:00] documents accordingly, it's never attracted much attention.

it was introduced after the abolition of the hereditaries because they needed something whereby the proof of hereditary titles could be acknowledged. Now, what the king has done, there's no Act of Parliament that removes the princely title and the dukedom from Andrew. What he's essentially done is he's removed him from the roll of the peerage, which means in official papers, in official government documentation, anything from the palace, and then bodies like national newspapers, for example, will not no longer refer to him as the Duke of York, but technically he still holds the title. So you could do that as an interim measure. Or indeed as an alternative to legislation. But it depends. Are you willing to gloss over the fact that the peerage title still exists? We're just not using it.

Mark D'Arcy: And the other one that's been taken away from Peter Mandelson is his membership of the Privy Council.

Ruth Fox: Yes.

Mark D'Arcy: That was simply withdrawn again by more or less just the King signing on the dotted line and out he went. And the Privy [00:29:00] Council oath, which you swear when you become a senior minister and get the title of right Honorable attached to your name, includes a line that you will keep secret all matters committed and revealed unto you, or that shall be treated of secretly in council. So someone forwarding emails, including briefings to the Prime Minister, I suspect might come under that.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Just for listeners, the Privy Council is the ancient body that advises the Monarch. There's 740 members of them at the moment. It's an incredible size its grown to. It includes certain members of the royal family, the Queen, the Prince of Wales are on it, politicians, high court judges, clergy, other senior figures in public life. And of course it carries the prefix title, the right honorable.

Mark D'Arcy: And so I always think there ought to be a lesser prefix, which is the quite honorable.

Ruth Fox: And again, membership is for life. But unlike a peerage, members can resign actually from the Privy Council. And there've been some examples of that. Famously, of course, in [00:30:00] 2013, Lord Prescott, John Prescott resigned in protest at the delay in granting the Royal Charter on press self-regulation. In the post-war period, I think there's been five MPs that have voluntarily asked to be taken off of the Privy Council. John Profumo, course we might come back to him in a moment. John Stonehouse, Jonathan Aitkin, Chris Huhne and Dennis McShane. John Profumo for giving a false statement to Parliament and all the others because for various reasons they were charged or sentenced in relation to criminal activities. The last MP, the last person, to be struck out of the list, as indeed is, now what's happening to Peter Mandelson, was the former Labour MP Elliot Morley, who pleaded guilty to false accounting and was imprisoned around his expenses. Peter Mandelson is gonna be struck from the list. The Prime Minister has advised the King that he thinks that should be done. So I imagine that's all now underway at the Privy Council.

Mark D'Arcy: Well, Ruth, there's nothing we enjoy more on this podcast than a lot of [00:31:00] twiddly parliamentary procedure points and structural points about the constitution and so forth. But I think we've also gotta take a quick look at the politics here. And we've already mentioned the sight of Keir Starmer's authority apparently evaporating almost in real time before our very eyes at Prime Minister's questions.

But this is one of the moments that's become familiar in recent years. Because it happened to Boris Johnson and it happened to Liz Truss and it now quite possibly is happening to Keir Starmer, but confidence just evaporates away. And suddenly they're looking around. Where are all my friends? And you do wonder if that is now happening to this Prime Minister?

Ruth Fox: Difficult to tell on watching it on screen only. You don't pick up all the atmospherics, but certainly the journalists in and around Westminster, and I know they can get a little bit carried away at times.

Mark D'Arcy: We're an excitable bunch.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. But they referred to it as one of the most febrile atmospheres they've seen basically since the days when Boris Johnson was in deep trouble.

And yes, he's clearly under considerable pressure. A number of [00:32:00] MPs have come out with statements equivalent to he's got to sack his chief advisor, Morgan McSweeney. And some have gone as far as suggesting that he will have to go. But we're a few weeks out from the Gorton by-election. We are then just weeks away from the local elections.

If he were to go, what would be the trigger? What are the alternatives? What would be the timing? It's easy to say he's lost authority. It's easy to say he ought to go. It's rather more difficult to conjure the steps by which that happens and the timetable for it in the weeks ahead.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah. But it is still a remarkable situation that once again British politics chewed up a Prime Minister and may be about to spit them out. I dunno where it goes. There are all sorts of reasons why Keir Starmer may be secure in his position as yet. Unlike Boris Johnson and indeed, Liz Truss, you haven't seen people resigning from the cabinet. If a couple of cabinet ministers were to depart in the next few days, I think skids really would be under him.

But then there's the question of who's the alternative? Angela [00:33:00] Rayner is still resolving her tax affairs. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, is probably too far to the right for a lot of Labour MPs to stomach, leaving aside the fact that it wasn't that long ago he was regarded as a Peter Mandelson protege. It was quite noticeable that he came out harder than almost any other Labour politician except possibly Sir Keir Starmer in attacking his former mentor, Peter Mandelson. But as you say, the Manchester Gordon by-election looms. After that, there's the local elections and the elections to the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and things could get very dicey if Labour does as badly as the polls suggest in those.

I suppose I could make the argument that one of the best reasons for allowing Andy Burnham to try and get back into the House of Commons is that Labour needs a plan B, and at the moment it doesn't have an obvious one.

Ruth Fox: No, although does Andy Burnham's personal profile, is it so powerful, so compelling, that it would overcome this mess at the moment?

And I do wonder whether he's perhaps had a lucky opportunity to [00:34:00] avoid defeat in the Gorton by-election. Possibly.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, possibly that would be fairly terminal for his career. If he resigned the mayoralty and then lost the by-election he was hoping to win. But all the same Labour doesn't have an obvious leadership alternative, and that's a little bit of a problem for them if Sir Keir Starmer is indeed chewed up and spat out.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, another thing we like on this podcast, Mark, is a bit of parliamentary history, so I wanted to get your thoughts, Mark. It is being speculated that this is the biggest political scandal since Profumo. Nigel Farage has come out and said it is a bigger scandal than Profumo. So we should probably explain what Profumo is to some of our listeners because as Kai O'Neill was saying earlier in the podcast with his question, that we know we have a growing band of young listeners and students and so on. What was Profumo and why might this scandal be bigger, do you think?

Mark D'Arcy: John Profumo was the Secretary of War. It was later rebranded as Secretary of Defense, but at that point, he was Secretary of War in Harold MacMillan's government in the early sixties. And it turned out that he [00:35:00] was sharing a girlfriend with a Russian naval attache at the London Embassy, which he would've thought was a touch awks for such a sensitive post.

And this was a scandal that really did have all the elements of a tabloid perfect storm, sex in high places, loose aristocratic parties, the Clifton set, and all sorts of dalliances by swimming pools at country houses. You had the fact that she was also the girlfriend of a West Indian who had convictions for smoking pot. It was an absolute cocktail of aristocratic vice that really caught the attention to the tabloids. And John Profumo denied a relationship with the lady in question and then was forced to admit that he had lied to Parliament. It brought Profumo down. He was forced to admit to the Prime Minister that he had lied. Harold Macmillan wrote him a very curt letter. Dear Profumo, you're out, or words to that effect, and off he went. And the national [00:36:00] security implications of this were quite staggering, really. And no one's ever managed to demonstrate that there was in fact a leak of sensitive information. But as I said, it was a fairly remarkable situation to have Britain's principal Defence Minister consulting with someone who was also consulting with a Russian diplomat. Does this compare? If anything, it might even be worse. We're talking about market sensitive information being deliberately leaked to a foreign financier. Sensitive briefings to the Prime Minister. Inside information out of which an awful lot of people can make an awful lot of money if they move quickly enough.

And I think that's the area that is causing real concern here. And of course, at the heart of all this is a story about young women being abused and treated as the play things of very powerful men. And that's something that really can't be forgotten in all this, that we are talking about criminal behavior, really serious criminal behavior.

But the other point I'd make about this is Westminster's [00:37:00] absolutely obsessed with Peter Mandelson and has been for more as 40 years ever since he became Labour's director of Communications under Neil Kinnock. Maybe though we need to raise our eyes to the bigger picture here, which is if you like this very ugly nexus between power, plutocracy, pimping and peerages, the four Ps, because there's quite a revelation here of the kind of world in which certain people in the sort of upper echelons operate and it's not at all an attractive picture. And it does suggest something much wider than just Peter Mandelson, an awful lot more people were doing very similar things.

I was reading in my newspapers this morning that there's a great deal of attention in France to some of the people who've been caught up in the Epstein papers in the upper echelons of French government and society. And that's all certainly true in other countries as well. So watch this space because there's something a lot more than Peter Mandelson going on here.

And you need to look at, for example, the pervasive influence of the tech bros. The way money is flowing to and fro. Contracts are [00:38:00] secured and deals are made behind closed doors.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And a lot of it might not just be about money, it's about contacts, that are the currency of relationships and not a direct exchange of money at the time.

It can be something in the future. Favors down the road. The big jobs with the banks and on the boards of these things. I have to say, Mark, it's a bit depressing. When we started this podcast, I never really thought we'd be talking about pimping and sex and all this kind of thing. It's Parliament Matters, but what have they brought us to.

Possibly worth just also stressing for some of our younger listeners and also for our international listeners, this email, and there may well be others to come out, but this email that was most shocking was this one where within seconds of receiving confidential information from advisors and from a minister at the height of the banking crisis when he was Trade Secretary, and involved in some of the most delicate, sensitive discussions about what was happening in the economy, what was happening in the banking sector, what was happening in the real economy. He was forwarding that on to [00:39:00] Jeffrey Epstein. If that had come out at the time, that he was proposing to Epstein to pass on a message to the head of an American bank investment bank, JP Morgan, that he should, what was the words, he should gently threaten the Chancellor of the Exchequer about capping banking bonuses. If that had come out at the time, at the height of the banking and financial crisis, he'd have been sacked on the spot, but also the level of public approbrium for the banking sector, the level of public disgust, heads of banks could barely show their face in public, at the risk of being lynched, one can't really imagine what the reaction of the public would've been. It would've been mutinous.

Mark D'Arcy: Absolutely. And people tend now to almost have glossed over quite how serious the 2008 financial crisis was. This was the moment when the cash machines nearly stopped working. It was an incredibly serious crisis that we just about got through. There were substantial economic consequences to it, which we are still living with today, incidentally, [00:40:00] but it was nowhere near as bad as it might have been, but something like that coming out at the time would've been incredibly destabilizing. Yeah, just the wrong moment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, there's an awful long way for this to run, this story, I think. There's both the politics, there's the criminal investigations, we've gotta see what papers come out as a result of the humble address. I think this is going on for not just weeks, but months, possibly even years.

Mark D'Arcy: Time now though perhaps to take another break.

And when we come back, let's talk about another long running parliamentary story, restoration and renewal. The latest developments. A new report out this week.

Ruth Fox: See you then.

And we're back. And, Mark hot off the press, literally this afternoon.

Mark D'Arcy: Still steaming.

Ruth Fox: It is a new report from the Restoration and Renewal Client Board in Parliament. Delivering restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster, a summary of the costed proposals. Now, we've talked about this being long awaited on the podcast and it's finally here.[00:41:00]

I've only read the summary report. At this stage, it is so hot off the press, there is a hundred and I think it's 128 pages that I will have to plow through in the coming days.

Mark D'Arcy: A labor of love for you.

Ruth Fox: A labor of love. But essentially it really concludes what previous reports on restoration and renewal have concluded that decanting from Parliament, so emptying Parliament to enable the work to be done and moving both chambers to other locations for the duration, would be the quickest, the cheapest, I use that term advisedly. because in no area is this cheap.

Mark D'Arcy: Cheap is not exactly the word.

Ruth Fox: But it is the cheapest option and it's also the safest option. So yes, here we are.

Mark D'Arcy: It's like deja vu all over again. You might say, round and round the hamster wheel goes, I think it was 2012 when a previous report on this issue of how to get the old Victorian building of the Palace of Westminster, the famous gothic building, back into proper working order because behind the scenes, [00:42:00] behind the facade of splendor, it really is crumbling and in some cases outright dangerous. There was a report in 2012 on this that concluded that doing nothing is not an option.

Ruth Fox: It was

Mark D'Arcy: As it turns out that was wrong. Fast forward 14 years and here we are cantering around the same options, more or less, that have been canvased endlessly in a series of reports between then and now without really a very great deal happening and certainly nothing approaching the full horror of an actual concrete decision on what to do.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, I think we're being a little bit unfair probably to the restoration and renewal teams that have worked on this since 2012.

A lot of work has been done, and it's not their fault.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not the teams who are to blame here. It is the politicians. Successive governments who haven't dared bite the bullet. What we've got is a situation where you decide to shoulder increasing ongoing maintenance and emergency repair costs, and the bills for that really are beginning to pile up now, rather than take a decision that you'd have to [00:43:00] spend a big headline sum of money. It would be cheaper ultimately to the taxpayer to spend the big headline sum of money than just go on doing running repairs to this vast building. But they don't dare bite that bullet.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Should we go through just the basic options?

I think we want to return to this in much more detail in a future podcast, Mark, and get some experts in to talk about it in more detail. But the headlines at the moment are that in this report for the last couple of years, they have looked at what's called the strategic case. Looking at three delivery options. They've actually come up with four because they've divided one delivery option into two. So the core options were full decant, where both Houses move out of the palace for the majority of the work program. The other option then is continued presence where the House of Lords would move out for the duration of the works and the Commons chamber and it's essential support functions, which are things like procedural services and so on, they [00:44:00] would remain in the palace whilst the work is going on.

Mark D'Arcy: But the Commons would sit in the chamber of the Lords.

Ruth Fox: Yes. And one assumes that's the plan. In this report, they recommend that work no longer be taken forward, that option be scratched because it takes too long, it's risky, and it would cost too much. So they want to scratch that option.

Mark D'Arcy: And when you talk about risky, what they mean is you'd basically have MPs walking through a building site to get to the chamber.

Ruth Fox: You'd be running our national legislature in a building site.

Mark D'Arcy: And there would be things like the risk of asbestos dust, for example.

There are genuine actual physical risks here. It's not just financial risk we're talking about.

Ruth Fox: Absolutely. There's then the enhanced maintenance and improvement option, which they split into two. So essentially under this is that, broadly, no more than 30% of the Palace of Westminster will be decanted at any one time.

So they'd split the palace into what are called 14 zones, and they'd work in stages. You'd be still operating in a building [00:45:00] site. So their first option was to retain both Chambers in place through the program. Any work in those areas would take place in recess and out of hours. Again, they have recommended in this report that option should not be further developed. Surprise, surprise. It was even in previous reports, this idea of staying in like this and doing all the work around recesses was madness.

Mark D'Arcy: Eyewateringly expensive. Partly it's just the stop start nature of the work. Because the sort of preparation before you can actually do the bit of work that you're able to do in a parliamentary recess is quite extensive. And then you've gotta unprepare and clear the way so that the politicians can return to a functional building and it's incredibly expensive.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean their best estimate was that option could take depending upon how you do it, it's set out in the report, anything between 52 and 84 years. I'll be dead. Definitely. So they want to scratch that option. They then have this other. EMI plus, so enhanced maintenance and improvement plus. [00:46:00] So EMI plus is essentially that the House of Lords will decant for quite a long time, up to 13 years, and the House of Commons will move into the House of Lords for a short period. They're thinking about two years.

Mark D'Arcy: And what's the plus in it? Preparatory work for further work as far as I can see.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And differentrent ways in which compared to the original enhanced maintenance and improvement package is a different way of doing it. so it's like premium option as opposed to your gold one.

But an important distinction is the amount of time and cost that it's gonna take.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, that's the thing, isn't it? What you have to look at here is how much these different options ultimately cost. You might be spending less a year on a more long, drawn out package, but ultimately the taxpayer would be talking out a great deal more in total.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Let's look at the numbers, Mark. Reducing it just to the two options that the Restoration and Renewal program people want, the House, both Houses, to concentrate on. Full decant, their best option, on time.

Mark D'Arcy: This is the get 'em all out and do the building work [00:47:00] without politicians in the way.

Ruth Fox: Quickest, cheapest, safest. Something in the region of 8.4 to 11.5 billion, not including inflation, but also not including opportunity, investment type benefits as well. The enhanced maintenance plus option, 11.8 to 18.7 billion. So a significant difference between those two options.

Mark D'Arcy: That's a few extra billion you could quite easily be doing something useful with instead.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And also the length of time, so full decant, they estimate 19 to 24 years to do. The enhanced maintenance option, 38 to 61.

Mark D'Arcy: So we're talking about moving the entire parliamentary flying circus out of its home for potentially 20 years.

Ruth Fox: Potentially, they say that under the full decant, they think that the House of Commons would decant for eight to 10 years of that period.

So it wouldn't be the entirety of that length of time. And the House of Lords would have to decant for between 12 and [00:48:00] 15. Under the enhanced maintenance option, the House of Commons would be out for two, but only into the Lords Chamber. The House of Lords, on the other hand, will be out for anything between eight and 13 years.

So you know, it's better for the House of Commons under these options. The House of Lords would certainly be out longer. One of the questions, of course, is if they go for full decant, where are they going to go? And I don't think at the moment those are entirely secure. So in terms of the House of Commons, they're talking about, you'd move the Commons to what's called the Northern estate?

Mark D'Arcy: Oh yes. This was the plan to create a new House of Commons chamber, an alternative chamber in what is at the moment the old Department of Health building.

Ruth Fox: Richmond House.

Mark D'Arcy: Richmond House, semi empty MPs offices in some of it. And it's an absolute maze inside. Every time I go there, I get lost. The idea would be to essentially gut that building and stick a version of the House of Commons chamber in there.

And MPs would then have that as their debating chamber until the old building is once again restored in [00:49:00] unusable condition. And that was an option that MPs really didn't like the look of and thought cost far too much.

Ruth Fox: At the time they were trying to develop it in a way that was comparable to what they already had. And the feeling that sort of ideas and costs had just got out of control.

Mark D'Arcy: A little bit gold plated.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. There are only so many places where you could actually move the Commons to, given the scale and the numbers of staff and so on. But they stopped work on that Richmond House building.

So I think work began and I think they scotched it. So the status of that, the work that would have to begin to put it in place, get it ready, equip it, that in itself would take time before they can even get to the work on the actual building itself once the MPs have all moved out.

Mark D'Arcy: That would include things like enhanced security on Whitehall.

So there'd suddenly be a big fence between the buildings that face onto Whitehall and the publicly open pavement, for example. So there are all sorts of complications like that. So you get that done first, then you've got somewhere to move MPs out to, so they move out to it, and then that part of [00:50:00] the building is open for restoration work.

Ruth Fox: Yep. So not easy choices. What's proposed in this report is what's called essentially with two stages, the stage one aspects of the work, this preparatory work, what they essentially want the House to do is say, we can focus on these two options for a period of seven years, the stage one work, which we think was gonna cost about 3 billion, we essentially want you to commit to that funding to enable us to start the work.

In that period, these two options would remain open in terms of how we move forward. But we do the resilience works around refurbishment of Richmond House. Of course, the House of Lords, we haven't said where the House of Lords would go if it was full decant. It'd be the QE II conference center.

But that is in the hands of the government. I think it's the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and certainly under the previous government, Michael Gove, when he was Secretary of State, was adamant that they were not taking that over. This government might take a different view, but a decision is gonna have to be made because that is [00:51:00] central to the plans for decant.

So they'd have to fit out that as an alternative chamber for the Lords. They'd have to do enabling works. They think they can do some early works on what's called the Medieval Cloister Court, Victoria Tower, which has already been emptied out of the archives and so on. The big tower of the House.

Mark D'Arcy: They've gone to Kew, haven't they?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So they can do some early work on those parts of the buildings, which are already accessible. And then they've gotta do, obviously, an awful lot of work around program management, procurement and so on. It's worth saying that even under enhanced maintenance and improvement, they still would have plans, I think, incorporated for alternative decant locations if they need it, because of the risk that if something goes wrong, they're gonna have to have somewhere to go to. You're still doing that kind of, some of at least, some of that kind of work.

Mark D'Arcy: There are any number of risks involved here. Gargoyles start plunging into busy public areas, or there might be a fire in the way of Notre Dame a few years ago in Paris. A disaster like [00:52:00] that. The electrics could go, it could be flooding, it could be the sewage system backing up. There are all sorts of rather horrible scenarios of what could go wrong in that building because it's in an incredibly poor state inside, despite the remedial work that's taken place.

Ruth Fox: One of the interesting headline figures I've seen is that there has been a significant increase in the number of maintenance tasks.

So they've got the financial years 2021 to 2022, up to 2023 to 2024, in that period over those three financial years, the number of reactive maintenance tasks has gone up 70%.

So it's not getting any better.

And obviously there's a sunk cost to all of this. I think it's something costing something like about a third of a billion in sunk maintenance costs and inflation for every year that there's a delay.

Mark D'Arcy: Wow. They're running fire patrols at the dead of night just to make sure that the building isn't gonna go up in smoke like Notre Dame.

But the objections to actually doing anything come under a series of headings here. First of all, there's the headline [00:53:00] cost. Which is what I think governments in particular are running scared of. The idea that MPs are building themselves some kind of luxury Parliament building, when actually what they're doing is making sure that the one we've got doesn't succumb to fire, floods or just fall down, for a start.

Ruth Fox: If anybody's under any illusions about the state of the building, on social media there are some really good videos of Kemi Badenoch in the Leader of the Opposition's office yesterday on the Robert Peston program, and she sat in her office being interviewed by the Peston program and behind her you can see a mouse shoot out from behind the furniture and run along the wall. And a lot of people have commented on it on social media and quite a lot of MPs have said, yeah, I've had three in my office this week.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, you can often see,

Ruth Fox: It's not unusual.

Mark D'Arcy: It's not just mice in the building. That's just one of the many problems with it. So you've got MPs running scared, governments in particular running scared of the headline cost of a [00:54:00] renovation scheme, then you've got their objection to being taken away from their traditional chamber. And then you've got the fear that a future government might decide that it's cheaper not to let them back.

Now how many billions is it worth to give MPs the privilege of standing in the historic House of Commons Chamber where Churchill once orated, because there is a considerable cost to that sensitivity, and frankly, it's in the House of Commons own decision whether it is permanently moved out of that chamber.

If a government comes to them with a vote saying, we insist that you move out to an industrial unit in Slough or something, MPs could always vote it down.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I don't think they'll be sending them to Slough, but yes. And also, we should remember the House of Lords has a say in this as well. If you remember when we had the Lord Speaker Hustings, which we had as an exclusive on this podcast, and Lord Forsyth at the time, one of the features of that hustings that evening was he let the cat out of the bag and basically told his fellow peers what [00:55:00] he had heard about what the total restoration costs were going to be.

And he said about 15 billion, he wasn't far off because, total program costs, including risk of inflation, and so on, they estimate, for total decant, could be up to 15.6 billion. But if you look at that over the period of 24 years, the government's not committing to pay 15.6 billion next month.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Or next year. It's 15.6 billion over the lifetime of a 24 year project. Now, that's not an insignificant sum. You're talking what not 0.6 billion a year, roughly. That's not a small sum of money. It's a big chunk of the government's spending each year.

Mark D'Arcy: But in the context of

Ruth Fox: But it's more manageable

Mark D'Arcy: Government spending.

Ruth Fox: It's manageable.

Mark D'Arcy: It's doable.

Ruth Fox: And I do think, MPs and peers and those who are gonna be asked about this in the media and so on do need to start getting that message across on the point about MPs not wanting to leave the House of Commons. The reality is, I think under the [00:56:00] current approach that's set out in this proposed report, if MPs and peers indeed back it when they do get to a vote, the current crop of MPs in this Parliament won't be affected because this seven year sort of phase one works will kick in and there'll be no decant until quite some years in the future.

Mark D'Arcy: Sometime in the mid 2030s.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And they would not make a decision until 2030, according to this report. In essence, the final decision whether to take the decant, full decant route, or the enhanced maintenance and improvement plus route, they wouldn't make a decision on that till 2030.

And of course then the work to pursue each of those avenues would have to go on further. So MPs in this Parliament are not going to be affected. If they get back in at the next Parliament, in the next Parliament, yes, they would.

Mark D'Arcy: Yeah, the if is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. But, leaving that point aside, I've gotta say that the level of and despair that steeps over me when I say, oh, let's kick the decision off another four years into the future and let's allow this [00:57:00] issue that has been hanging around since 2012, at least, if not a great deal earlier, because there've been reports before that about the need for restoration and renewal. Let's keep avoiding the question. Let's run away from it. Let's just cross our fingers and hope the whole place doesn't burn down.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, who would want to be the Prime Minister or the Leader of the House of Commons on whose watch that happened.

Mark D'Arcy: As a metaphor for Modern Britain, it might be a little bit near the nail.

Ruth Fox: Indeed, but quick off the mark. The report having come out of the trade unions, Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA Union, which is the trade union for managers and professionals in public service, it's one of, it's not the only, trade union in Parliament. He's tweeted today, no more reports, no more commissions, no more dithering and delay, we need a decision now. Waiting any longer will only continue to increase the costs and the danger posed. And the FDA said it is farcical to wait until 2030 to make a final decision on what approach to take. The facts haven't changed. Independent reports and parliamentary staff agree. Full decant is the [00:58:00] safest, quickest, most cost effective way to make Parliament safe.

Mark D'Arcy: Will any notice be taken? I'd rather fair not.

Ruth Fox: We will see. We don't know the next stage at the moment. So they will, the leader of the House of Commons said at business questions today that there was no date announced for a vote. Which we are thinking there might be, but that there is no date for a vote.

But he announced that, in due course, we will be bringing forward the matter for debate and decision. So make of that what you will, what does in due course mean?

Mark D'Arcy: One of favorite parliamentary phrases.

Ruth Fox: Yes. But it's just worth noting that in the past when some of these reports have come out in due course has been about 12 months or more.

So hopefully not in this case. Not least, because they clearly need to crack on with some of the, even some of the basic work to prepare for whatever option is chosen. So further delay is not helpful, but does the government, given all the many problems it's got on its plate, want to add this one to it and persuade MPs to walk through the lobbies to spend 3 billion pounds?

Mark D'Arcy: Very difficult, I grant you, but either one of the most [00:59:00] recognisable buildings on the planet is allowed to continue deteriorating or you do something about it.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D'Arcy: It's a binary choice.

Ruth Fox: So let's hope they take it.

Mark D'Arcy: And on that cheery note, Ruth, I think we reached the end of today's podcast.

Ruth Fox: Great.

So I will see you next week.

Mark D'Arcy: See you then. Bye. Bye.

Outro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media at HansardSociety.

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