00:00 Introduction 00:45 EU reset: Will Parliament get a say? 07:00 Ministers, missing evidence and honest trade-offs 10:00 The EU reset bill: How much power for ministers? 14:00 Parliament’s eyes and ears in Brussels 17:00 Rebuilding Parliament’s EU oversight 21:45 Data centres: National ambitions, local costs 29:30 Will the next election be an AI election? 32:15 Parliament Square: A place for people? 40:00 A visitor centre for Britain’s constitutional heart 43:00 Improving visitor access to Parliament through the Restoration and Renewal Programme 47:00 Closing remarks

House of Lords, European Affairs Committee

• Dynamic Alignment: A Fundamental Change, 3rd Report of Session 2026-27, HL Paper 88, 13 November 2026

• Dynamic Alignment inquiry, Hansard Society oral evidence, 15 June 2026

• Dynamic Alignment inquiry, Hansard Society written evidence, April 2026

Hansard Society

• Dynamic alignment and Henry VIII powers: What will the Government’s EU reset mean for Parliament? A conversation with Professor Catherine Barnard - Parliament Matters podcast, Episode 139

Please note, this transcript is automatically generated. There may consequently be minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript copy below, please first check against the audio version above.

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: Why Parliament needs a powerful role in Andy Burnham’s EU Reset.

Mark D’Arcy: MPs weigh in on the government’s new planning guidelines for data centres.

Ruth Fox: And pedestrianising Parliament Square. Could it finally happen?

Mark D’Arcy: But first Ruth, later this month, Andy Burnham will be at a summit with the EU to negotiate a new closer post Brexit relationship in practice, this will probably mean a new treaty followed by a stream of legislation and regulations to bring the [00:01:00] UK into line with at least some areas of the EU’s single market. It’s known in the trade as dynamic alignment.

And Ruth, the question for MPs is, do they and peers have any kind of role beyond passively rubber stamping this stuff? As luck would have it a Lord’s committee weighed in this week with a report that was heavily influenced by, uh, you.

Ruth Fox: Yes, kind of. So this is the House of Lords European Affairs Committee who’ve been doing this inquiry into dynamic alignment. And um, yes, I and our colleague, Matthew England gave evidence to the committee. We submitted quite detailed written evidence and then were called to give oral evidence. And, um, I think, you know, the first thing you do, Mark, when you get the report is you look, you know, how many times have you been cited? How many times are you in the footnotes?

Mark D’Arcy: What’s your hit rate?

Ruth Fox: Okay. So I think, I think I counted 61 mentions, um, some of those are footnotes. So it’s, it’s not quite as, uh, straightforward. But yes, we are mentioned quite a number of times, and I think broadly the reports in keeping with what we were pushing for, which is that [00:02:00] Parliament has got to get its act together in order to be able to scrutinise and act as a sort of institutional quality control on whatever is gonna be the nature of our relationship with EU.

Not in five or 10 years after we’ve had a conversation about what a relationship with you will be as Andy Burnham is, is suggesting the country needs to have, but what’s imminent, which is a deal apparently going to be signed probably on the 20th of November at this reset summit initiated by the Keir Starmer government now sort of inherited and taken forward by the Burnham government.

And this will be, we think, on three core areas. And we’ve talked about them on the podcast before you’ll remember we had Catherine Barnard . Professor Catherine Barnard on to talk about this. So again, we get into some quite techy areas here, but SPS deals, so sanitary and phyto sanitary arrangements.

So essentially the kinds of things that affect cross border trade for things like food produce and crops and, and so on. [00:03:00] Emissions trading scheme, which essentially around carbon adjustments and our electricity market arrangements. So there’s also the prospect of future deals possibly on youth movement and, and so on.

So the committee’s basically saying, look, these deals are coming down the pipeline. We don’t have any detail about what they’re gonna look like at the moment. That’s all held within government Parliament is going to have to see a treaty, it’s gonna have to see legislation, there are gonna be regulations that follow.

And then there’s a big debate about how we scrutinise those arrangements going forward.

Mark D’Arcy: Because one of the besetting sins of the way that Parliament Scrutinised stuff in the era when we were a member state at the EU was that an awful lot of stuff was just lazily waived into British law. I remember causing a minor sensation one day by turning up to be the only journalist present at a European committee, scrutinising some European regulation or other, and this was virtually unprecedented.

And people were looking at one at the other and saying, what’s he doing here? Why is that? We’ve [00:04:00] got a journalist in in the press box there. This has never been seen before in the history of time.

Ruth Fox: Bill Ka liked you though that day.

Mark D’Arcy: The, the fact that this things gather so little attention and are done in a very ritualistic way.

There are a lot of people who were present at these European committees who would simply vote the way their whips told them, pay no attention to the substantive business they’d be getting on the. Constituency correspondence or whatever, scribbling away and just stick their hands up when the word came for them to vote.

And that was that. So parliamentary engagement in European issues historically was pretty poor when we were in EU member state. And I think that helped feed the grievance behind Brexit that we were just taking regulations and not really doing anything about them. Partly because by the time regulations reach Parliament, you have the classic dilemma that either you rejected something as unacceptable and but potentially blew up a whole EU agreement, or you just took it on the chin and gritted your teeth and choose your metaphor and accepted something that you didn’t particularly like, [00:05:00] because the consequences of not accepting it were worse.

Ruth Fox: Mm-hmm. But in those days, we had a voice upstream Yeah. In the room when the negotiations were happening, you know, in the various European Bodies Council of Ministers, the Commission, and we had a role in the consultations under dynamic alignment. I’d argue the scenario is gonna be worse. Mm-hmm. Because in these areas, we could find, depending upon what the detail of the treaty is, we could find that we have a conduit for which a sort of a pipeline by which EU regulations apply in the UK in these areas, not others, but in these areas.

And there’s nothing really we can much do about them. I mean, there’ll be measures in the treaty, no doubt, that if we particularly object, then we could refuse. And we’ll face sanctions and countermeasures. And then you’re into the debate about, well, what do they look like and what are the trade-offs and the risks of those.

So the reality is, in practice, you’re gonna be taking them in. There is a, a way in which the EU engages with countries like Oz, like Norway, like Switzerland, to [00:06:00] have upstream, you know, a voice before they formulate their proposals. It’s known as in, in, in EU terms as the decision shaping process. But it’s decision shaping.

It’s not decision making.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. And the decisions and the people in the room, these are decisions made by EU member states for EU member states, and their interests Trump those of,

Ruth Fox: of

Mark D’Arcy: course, countries outside the EU, which is not wholly surprising.

Ruth Fox: No.

Mark D’Arcy: So that’s the, yeah, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. That’s what happens in the club, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But the fear, I think, is in terms of a democratic argument, is that we will have this deal. The Treaty Parliament will no doubt have the opportunity to scrutinise it under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act. So it’ll have 21 sitting days to look at it once it’s laid before Parliament.

Possibly longer if, but only if the government agrees to give it longer in the House of Lords. They’ll no doubt be able to have a debate because as regular listeners will know peers, if they want to debate, they set their own agenda.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: In the Commons, it’ll be entirely up to the government. Whether they get a debate, I, [00:07:00] I think they’ll struggle to avoid one on this particular issue.

But nonetheless, that’s the position.

Mark D’Arcy: At the very least, frankly, if uh, the government doesn’t schedule a, a debate, one of the upcoming opposition days would be used for it. For it. Yeah. So you might as well have a debate on your own terms. And again, we come to what I, I still think of as the be settings in here, the recurring temptation to just sort of slip things through with us as little fuss as possible and never have what may turn out to be necessary fights about the rights and wrongs of a particular proposal around the EU.

Endlessly you got a situation where people would suddenly wake up to the consequences of what had been slipped through and be annoyed that it had been slipped through.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think this is where this report is, is interesting ‘cause it makes two points, I think about the government’s attitude.

The first one is it’s quite critical of the Minister Hamish Falconer’s. Yeah. Successive ministers. I mean, Hamish Falconer now. And I think it also applied to Nick Thomas Simmons when he was the European Affairs Minister, that the inquiry has been trying to get a minister to appear before them for six months [00:08:00] and they haven’t been able to get them.

And the minister has apparently said he’ll appear after the summit. Now it’s complicated to go into now, but read the report. It’s quite clear that the minister’s view appears to be that if the EU negotiations going on and in the committee’s running an inquiry that is in any way germane to that, even tangentially, then he’s not gonna give evidence to the committee until after the deal is done and the summit takes place and then he’s gonna appear apparently four or five days after the summit.

So at the end of this month. Well, that’s just not good enough really,

Mark D’Arcy: if the principle is here that ministers are unwilling to engage with parliamentary committees about EU matters when there’s an impending summit. And that’s a bit like saying they’re not prepared to appear on a day ending in a Y

Ruth Fox: Well quite, this inquiry wasn’t about the detail of the SBS deal, it wasn’t about the detail of the emissions trading scheme.

Mm-hmm. Or the electricity market deal. It’s not getting into the minutiae of the negotiations. It’s about the [00:09:00] process by which this is being done, about the process by which the government is going to present information to Parliament. How much candour it’s gonna have in terms of what it does. I mean, the other critique in in the report is, it’s quite strong in saying what its expectations are about what should be in things like the impact assessments and the breadth of the impact assessment, the kinds of things that it should cover, and the degree to which ministers are forthright about the trade-offs.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: You know, it is all very well doing your press release and your press statement and fronting up about the benefits and how you wanna stop friction at the border for companies that trade and want to get goods through Dover or whatever it may be. That’s fine. Everybody can understand that. But then what’s the negatives on the other side?

Mark D’Arcy: And I think a, a, an honest discussion of the costs as well as the benefits of the relationship with the EU is something that’s absolutely essential. Now, otherwise we could end up again stocking up a whole load of resentments about whatever Andy [00:10:00] Burnham’s deal eventually is because no one’s actually discussed it openly and honestly at the time, the feeling that a lot of our escalating relationship with what started off as the common market and became the European Union was simply that it was all done by sight of hand.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And I think there’s a few things for Parliament and particularly MPs to look out for in this process going forward. And I know we’ve got quite a lot of MPs listen, so I hope that this helps them in terms of thinking through the step-by-step process, something that many of them will not have dealt with before.

‘cause all the Brexit stuff was dealt in the last Parliament. It’s, they’ve not had to deal with it so much in this. The first thing is once the summit announcement is made, we’ll get press statement. There’ll be documentation, but two things, we’ll then follow. There’ll be a treaty, a legal text. Mm-hmm. And there’ll be a bill.

So we was told in the King’s Speech that there was gonna be an EU reset Bill. Nick Thomas Simmons said in January of this year that he wanted that bill to be into law get Royal as sent by the end of this [00:11:00] calendar year. Well, that didn’t happen.

Mark D’Arcy: Looks a bit improbable now. I

Ruth Fox: mean, yeah,

Mark D’Arcy: I’ve just been looking at the forthcoming parliamentary timetable.

There isn’t anything yet on the second reading of such a bell.

Ruth Fox: No.

Mark D’Arcy: In the next couple of weeks.

Ruth Fox: Well, I think, I think it all got shelved. I mean, you know, we had several dates where we were told to expect it in the summer. It didn’t happen. It all got caught up in the, the internal shenanigans of the Labour Party’s leadership dispute.

And now of course Andy Burnham. You know, then there was a delay in the summit taking place. So I think the question is how quickly does the bill emerge after the summit? And does it emerge before or at the same time as or after the treaty text?

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. You do wonder, don’t you, whether MPs are essentially gonna be asked to buy a pig and a poke here.

This, this bill gives ministers the power to implement a deal you haven’t seen yet, which may not have been fully struck yet, whatever it happens to be. So a massive Henry VIII power that that simply gives the ministers can’t blanche.

Ruth Fox: This is the question, I think, will the bill [00:12:00] provide for, in effect the legislative implementing arrangements for this deal, whatever it looks like.

And will it only apply to these three policy areas or as was feared in relation to whatever deal and legislative arrangements Keir Star’s government was planning. We were told that there would be a Henry VIII power in that EU partnership, bill Henry VIII Power, that would enable ministers to amend laws already passed by Parliament, by ministerial dicta, essentially in other areas where they might want to strike future deals.

So the key question is, the deal might cover these three areas, but does the bill ‘cause if the bill has a power which goes beyond those three areas, then looking further down the road when the government strikes new deals, parliament’s gonna have less influence at that point.

Mark D’Arcy: The sky’s the limit really at that point, isn’t

Ruth Fox: it?

Once, once you’ve got the Henry VIII power in, ministers can then make the [00:13:00] regulations to put in place the dynamic alignment arrangements, which will mean that Parliament has no, or next to no influence at all on these regulations in the, in these policy areas in the future going forward. And the only way they could stop it would be to vote against a statutory instrument.

Now, if it’s subject to the negative procedure, which of course the European Communities Act arrangements were struck in the 19 Tice back in the day. Yeah. Which was the cause of so many of the, the concerns of people like, you know, the Arch Brex tears like Bill Cash. I think that will be unacceptable. You just cannot do it through a negative statutory instrument.

Listeners will know this is my favourite subject. It would just be democratically unacceptable in my view. So let’s assume that the government accepts that it’s an affirmative statutory instrument, then the only way in which Parliament could stop these things in the future would be to vote against them in the Commons and or the Lords.

Mm-hmm. Now. We know the House of Commons hasn’t voted against a statutory instrument since 1979.

Mark D’Arcy: [00:14:00] Yeah, well this is one of the big problems that exactly echoes the problems that we had as member states of the EU and seems to be coming back again if people are not very careful the way rounded insofar as there is a way around it is for Parliament as well as the government to be involved in the decision shaping phase.

To have an upstream look at what the EU might be proposing and try and influence things at the time. Possibly sending in a signal that up with this British MPs will not put in some extreme cases and just trying to shape those decisions, even as a non-member state, they would have a little bit of influence.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well as you say, there’s this decision shaping opportunity. So I mean, kind of two elements to this. One is, what role would Parliament want in decision shaping any future dynamic alignment arrangements in other policy sectors beyond these three core ones that we appear to be starting with and how would that work?

Mm-hmm. And you know, you want, you want that to be as upstream, as early as [00:15:00] possible in the negotiations. A point I made to the committee when I gave evidence was, does Parliament do the Commons and Lords Committees want the eyes and ears on that process to be purely provided through essentially a government information pipeline?

Or does Parliament wants its own as and ears on the process, in which case if it does, it needs effectively a mission in Brussels.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. So a sort of Euro secretariat of experts who can give them Commons library style analysis of any particular Euro measure that might be sent for their consideration and at an early stage too.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, and this, this wouldn’t be radical. We used to have one when we were members of the EU. I think there’s still a parliamentary presence and office in in Brussels, but obviously it’s not staffed and resourced to the degree that would be needed for this kind of eyes and ears diplomatic information network that we’re talking about.

So, so there’s that sort of upstream for future deals, but then there’s the downstream bit for these three deals and [00:16:00] potential future ones, which is the actual regulations themselves. Mm-hmm. And we don’t know what the governance structure will look like that will be set out in the treaty. That’s why it’s so important.

We have the treaty text at the same time as or before we have the bill.

Intro: Mm-hmm.

Ruth Fox: And what would that look like? Now we assume it will be something not dissimilar to what they’ve got with the Swiss or, or what the EU’s got with Norway. So something like a, a joint committee of the EU in the UK that would consider these regulations, these proposals before they’re sort of incorporated.

But then you’re into, okay, well what kind of arguments can you make and try and influence the process before the EU signs it into stone through their processes, whereas you say they’re gonna be concentrated on their interests and what are the sanctions and countermeasures that would apply if we were not happy with it, if we thought it was utterly contrary to our interests.

But the important thing I think might hear is that. The other deals that the EU has done all pay attention to and respect the fact that [00:17:00] whatever process is put in place by the third country. The EU will respect their constitutional and parliamentary procedures.

Mark D’Arcy: Mm.

Ruth Fox: Now they have written constitutions.

We don’t, and that’s why I think it’s so important, therefore, that the parliamentary procedures are set up and put in place as soon as possible. Because otherwise it will be hard to argue to the EU that we can’t do X because we need to put it through our, our European Scrutiny Committee in the Commons or whatever arrangement is set up.

If we didn’t have that to start with.

Mark D’Arcy: Hmm. Yeah. And, and that should lead to a debate about the exact nature of, particularly the House of Commons arrangements for scrutinising this stuff. Is there going to be one all singing, all dancing European scrutiny committee that deals with everything? Are the select committees going to find a way that they call in particularly important European regulations in their particular bailiwick?

How’s it going to work? Is there gonna be perhaps a joint committee [00:18:00] with the House of laws, perhaps drawing on the considerable expertise of some of the Lord’s European scrutiny operations? So there are, there are different ways in which it could be configured, but the people in charge of that side of things, which I, I think boils down to being the Commons Liaison Committee really needs to develop some ideas about this and pretty quickly.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, as you know, when we talk to Liam Byrne about the committee he’s leading to review the effectiveness of the select committee system for the Liaison Committee. This will be one of the issues that I’m sure other organisations have put into evidence and, and, and that we’ve been arguing for. But they need to get a move on.

I mean, this can’t wait till next summer to be put into place. I suspect we come back to the same problem. The government would move the motions to set something up. It abolished the European Scrutiny Committee on one of its first days in office after the 2024 election. Barely anybody noticed. ‘cause so many of the new MPs had no idea what what was going on.

And most of them were giving their maiden speeches at that time. If the government has got to move the motion to set something up, then there’s gonna have to be an almighty amount [00:19:00] of pressure in the Commons pushing for this to happen in order to persuade the government to do it because it’s not in their own interest to set something up.

They, they’d rather, as you say, push things through with rather less scrutiny. I suspect they’ll move these things through, you know, the Foreign Affairs Committee can look at this business, can look at this, or this is a regulation affecting electricity. It can go to the, to the Energy Select committee. But what you end up with is you end up with sort of siloed scrutiny.

Mark D’Arcy: Yes, exactly. And you don’t want this to be organised. You want this to be something where someone is taking an overall view, because a lot of the precedents set in one area can start echoing through other areas as well. Now, the, the point I make, governments don’t normally get very enthusiastic about subjecting themselves to greater scrutiny, but Andy Burnham came in talking about doing politics in a different way.

He did. And being more open. And this is an area where he could put that into practice and really should.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well if you’re serious about having a conversation with the nation about the future relationship with the EU, then there’s gotta be a degree of candour.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: [00:20:00] And there’s gotta be some honesty about trade offs and the, the costs and the benefits.

We are already partway into this process. We’ve got the Windsor Framework Agreement in relation to Northern Ireland. I mean, that doesn’t get anywhere near the coverage that it needs and is affecting the politics of, of Northern Ireland at the moment. And I’m sure it’s gonna be a live issue at the assembly elections next year.

We’ve already got voluntary dynamic alignment through the product regulation and metrology bill. Yeah. Stuff is already happening under the bonnet and it’s important that this, it is scrutinised in the round.

Mark D’Arcy: But again, you run into another of the classic problems of European scrutiny, which is when you start talking about the product regulation and metrology act and other Euro structures.

There’s loud buzzing starts in my head, you know, and, and, and the sheer complexity and technocracy of it all becomes oppressive very quickly. And that’s always been the problem with the EU in Britain is that the structures are very, very complicated. People don’t instinctively understand them, and [00:21:00] therefore a lot of stuff that goes on isn’t really noted at the time.

Ruth Fox: Well, I get that up to a point, Lord Copper, but my experience is that other countries cope. Yeah. Other member states within the cope. And it’s not beyond the witten wisdom of our political class to do the same, but it takes some time and some commitment

Mark D’Arcy: and there’s never been the commitment.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And, and all during Brexit, my experience, we used to be asked to meet quite regularly with diplomats from the embassies, uh, particularly some of the Benelux and the Scandinavian embassies as they were trying to understand the parliamentary and legislative process during Brexit.

And my experience was that they would come to meetings better briefed, better armed with information than frankly our own MPs. And there a moral, and that’s a depressing, there was a depressing experience and I don’t think much has changed, frankly.

Mark D’Arcy: And on that cheery now, Ruth, shall we take a break?

Ruth Fox: Take a break.

See in a minute.

We’re back. And, um, last week, mark, we were talking about data centres in the context of the US midterm elections. In our [00:22:00] conversations with Daniel Schumann about what was gonna happen in Congress and Bien Kidron about, uh, her campaign against the tech companies. And we were discussing what a big and toxic factor data centres had been over there.

And, uh, well this week MPs have been tooling up to consider a national policy planning statement on where and how it would be permissible to build data centres in England and Wales. And, um, apparently a special committee is gonna be set up to scrutinise these policy statements chaired by Toby Perkins, the chair of the Environmental Audit Select Committee.

So what team, what can you tell us about this?

Mark D’Arcy: Well, this is a system that’s been set up since the 2008 Planning Act. The idea is that national policy statements help us move faster to build critical national infrastructure. I think they’re called nips, nationally significant infrastructure projects.

Ruth Fox: Nassp

Mark D’Arcy: NASS sounds like a flower. But anyway, the idea is to create, it’s not [00:23:00] exactly a fast track process, I don’t think you could say it is actually fast, but it’s not as slow as, uh, the previous planning system had been. The idea is that the government takes an in principle decision on whether a certain kind of national infrastructure is needed.

And then, uh, this feeds into a planning system where planning inspectors decide whether a particular infrastructure project in a particular place can go ahead and there’s consultation with local authorities and local voices and environmental organisations and all that. But what you don’t get is a kind of real litigation of whether, for example, nuclear power is a good thing or a bad thing.

The government’s planning policy statement has already dealt with that issue. So that’s the general idea of this. And so these planning policy statements are incredibly important documents ‘cause they set out the framework for those kind of decisions. And with data centres, which weren’t, I think [00:24:00] particularly envisaged in the 2008 act.

‘cause I don’t think we really had data centres on the scale at that stage. The data centres, this has proved to be an incredibly toxic issue. As you were saying in the states, it swung votes. Whole states were won and lost on whether particular candidates from particular parties were pro or anti data centres.

And there’s quite a revolt. It’s partly because I think they’re seen as a kind of symbol of the evils of AI taking away jobs and so forth. But it’s partly also because data centres can put an enormous strain on local power grids can put an enormous strain on local water. Resources can just be huge blos on the landscape, perhaps emitting an annoying buzzing sound the whole time.

And so having a set of rules in Britain for the construction of our data centres is quite an important thing. And the government needs to get it right and needs to come up with a framework that balances the local interest with the considerable national interest in having data centres in this country so that we are not reliant on, for example, American cloud computing and some rogue [00:25:00] American president with, for the sake of argument, orange skin.

Were to decide to switch them off one day because we are displeased him.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So. The Liaison Committee has got a handle on this and it has decided that there should be a committee specially established MPs only is this?

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah, so it’s an, it is an MPs only committee. Um, the way it works is that the Liaison Committee decides how a particular national policy statement should be fielded.

So for example, the one on Heathrow airport expansion was just given straight to the Transport select committee, which held a quick and dirty inquiry into it. This time you’ve got something that is cross-cutting in a number of ways. So at the moment, Toby Perkins, the chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, will be the chair of this committee, but it will also include people like Shean ura, for example, the Science and Technology Committee.

Mm-hmm. And MPs from a variety of other select committees that have an interest in this particular matter. So it’s a joint committee set up for one purpose to hold one single inquiry to inform MPs about this issue and what they think of the policy [00:26:00] statement. And that may or may not then lead to a Commons debate or even a vote on the policy statement depending on how controversial the issue is deemed to be in this case.

I would be surprised if this didn’t end up in the floor of the House of Commons by some means or another.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D’Arcy: Whether it was an opposition day debate or a backbench debate, or the government just deciding it ought to schedule a debate. But, uh, all the same. This is the structure that’s been decided. The, the Liaison Committee decides how the Commons starts off its consideration of this issue.

Ruth Fox: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think they’ve rescheduled a, uh, for next week a debate on AI that, um, they ran out of time on a previous day a couple of weeks ago. So there may be some mention of this now. I’d be surprised if data centres doesn’t come up in that debate in some form, given the MP’s interest in this.

Mark D’Arcy: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s certainly something that is already generating lots of local campaigns in places where it’s mooted that a data centre might appear. And I think the debate itself is supposed to be about the dangers of advanced [00:27:00] ai. And I think this is more kind of the terminator scenario where Arnold Schwartzenegger will come and get us if we’re not careful.

But I’m pretty sure as you say that the subject, the data centres will find its way in there.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Well, I mean, what’s feeding the AI is, is it gonna have to be the data centres? I mean, you can’t have this, this advanced frontier ar ai if you haven’t got the resources behind it for the computing capacity.

So,

Mark D’Arcy: but it’s just a matter of what sort of regulations will be adopted. Will these data centres have to come with their own reservoir or their own power generating capacity, so they’re not causing grey outs in the adjoining areas or water shortages in adjoining areas. For example, will there be some kind of local benefit?

I mean, Andy Burnham. Came to power as Prime Minister, as a localist who wanted to decentralise power. And one of the things that’s happened in America is that in some places, data centres are paying considerable amounts of local taxes and that has transformed the economic. I was listening to one of the many American political podcasts I listened to, I can’t even remember quite [00:28:00] which one now, but there was a very interesting description of how data centres in one locality were providing so much extra revenue that the local school board was finally able to hire actual teachers, which was considered apparently quite a novelty in the area.

Ruth Fox: So, so they were into trade offs, aren’t we? Yeah. And, and having an, you know, because we were talking about in the first segment about the EU, you know, having an upfront, honest discussion about the costs and the benefits and that there are no easy answers.

Mark D’Arcy: Mm-hmm.

Ruth Fox: There are no quick solutions, but you’ve gotta have a, a robust debate where you balance the pros and the cons and, and you can’t pretend that there aren’t costs and there are only benefits, or conversely, there are no benefits.

It’s all cost. It just doesn’t work that way. You’ve gotta balance them. And that is, I think, too often what we’re not getting.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. The issues around data centres are unusual in a way, because once they’re built, they’re not really big job creators. There won’t be all that many people involved in working at the actual data centres.

A few people, you know, sort of sweeping the floors and scooping up the cobwebs and [00:29:00] looking after the security perhaps. But by and large, they won’t be employing thousands of people in, in a locality. So what you’re looking at is, alright, they, they’re still generating an enormous round of revenue for their owners.

Maybe their owners can divert a little bit of that stream into the locality that perhaps is putting up with a blot on the landscape and an annoying buzzing sound in the distance. Yeah. And give them some payoff for that. Yeah. That’s a very Andy Burnham way of looking at things. I would’ve thought, this is the great localist Prime Minister who, who wants to give communities more power over what happens.

And some of those communities will have the ability to engage in the kind of trade offs you are talking about. Okay, we’ve gotta put up with this. But we get that in return. It is possibly something that could be very helpful to a lot of communities in perhaps areas that have been struggling economically for a long time.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah. Did occur to me after last week in the discussions we had with, uh, you know, about the midterms and with Bien Kidron, that if you think about the pace at which AI is moving, the change and the [00:30:00] varied impacts it can have for good nil. If the government is not going to go for an election next year, as they, as they say, and we are looking to two and a half years down the calendar.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that it’s an AI election. Mm-hmm. That, you know, AI dominates the debate. It affects our relationship with the world. It affects things like, as you say, the environment. It’s a live debate in many, many constituencies across the country in terms of things like data centres.

It’s an, or, or alternatively it’s affecting, you know, labour, you know, the impact on jobs. I mean, certain industries are clearly seeing a accountancy and, and law firms, apparently the idea of entry level positions, you know, in a couple of years time, just not basically gonna exist because they don’t need them.

They’re doing everything by ai. So it is affecting white collar jobs in a way that blue collar industries have, have been so badly affected over the last 30 years. While the next 30 it’s gonna be white collar jobs, in which [00:31:00] case, you know, the, the, the nature of the election debate could be quite different to what we’ve experienced in recent years.

Mark D’Arcy: Well, certainly in America there has been a revolt against ai and the tech companies are fantastically unpopular, which may explain why certain tech billionaires putting hundreds of millions of dollars into political advertising turned out not to have nearly the effect they thought it would. Being the, the, the site of particular politicians being aligned to tech billionaires was deadly to them.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark D’Arcy: So it may well be that, that becomes a factor. And you do have an awful lot of recent graduates really struggling to find jobs, but still having a political voice. Mm-hmm. And that voice will doubtless, make itself heard. So as you say, this may be almost the first blast of the trumpet on AI that we are hearing here in, in the, in this forthcoming debate and the witnesses taken by this committee.

This is going to be a massive issue. And it may be that you have at least one, maybe more parties going into the next election, essentially saying AI bad.

Ruth Fox: Mm. Which we take a break there and, um, let’s [00:32:00] come back and talk about Parliament Square.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. Look at the setting in which Parliament operates. It’s always a vital topic for parliamentarians.

Ruth Fox: See you in a minute.

Mark D’Arcy: We are back. And Ruth, as every visitor to the Westminster Parliament discovers that majestic Victorian building sits at the centre of a semi-permanent traffic jam. The streets around it are typically choked with slow moving cues of cars and taxis and buses all inching their way through a fog of exhaust fumes.

For years, the idea of pedestrian Parliament Square and the road in front of Parliament itself has been mooted. But is something finally gonna happen?

Ruth Fox: Well, possibly

Mark D’Arcy: springs eternal.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. Springs eternal. A freedom of information request has revealed not from us, I should say, from I think a historian or a, a tour guide of some kind.

Freedom of information request to Westminster City Council has revealed that there are plans afoot involving the council transport for London, the Westminster [00:33:00] Parliament. They’ve got a working group to look at the possible pedestrianisation of the square two sides, and the road that runs in front of, of Parliament with a view to addressing the traffic choking.

The pedestrian choking. And particularly at the height of tourist season, you can barely move

Mark D’Arcy: and breathe those fumes. Yeah. Dodge those selfie sticks, you know?

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And obviously the security issues as well. The proximity between the road, the traffic and the outer walls of the Parliament building. It’s very, very close.

Concerns have been. Okay. They’ve got some quite ugly barriers up there and bollards that were designed to stop your car bomb driving into the building, but nothing stops. You exploding it outside. So there’s all sorts of concerns. There’s been plans on this for years. I mean, you can go back to Ken Livingston as mayor.

He had squares for all project. The idea was to pedestrianise this square as, as well as others, never made any progress for various reasons, but there seems to be renewed [00:34:00] interest there. Apparently they’ve been sort of doing some scoping work, some conceptual work, and there’s possibly gonna be a consultation in the new year on this.

But interestingly, it comes off the back of the news that Oxford Street has been pedestrianised, uh, the initiative of the, the mayor of London. And that’s

Mark D’Arcy: with apparently reasonable success.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. You know, we’re in the early weeks in the run up to Christmas, but the report suggests that they’ve had a significant increase in shoppers and the shops making money compared to this time last year.

So that would bode well, we’ve argued for it for years because I mean, it, it’s one of the great civic spaces, or should be one of the great civic spaces of the world.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah, it’s a huge missed opportunity. When you look at the Parliament Square area, it’s divided up by busy roads as we’ve described. There are a few people sitting here.

There’s a demonstration in camp there, there are a couple of statues isolated that you have to get across a busy crossing to actually get to go and see. And it could be, as you put it, a great civic [00:35:00] space. We don’t really do those very well in Britain a lot of the time, I feel, but not

Ruth Fox: these days. You

Mark D’Arcy: could imagine something that looked an awful lot more friendly and interesting than the current arrangements, where amongst other things you’ve got this whole set of kind of anti-terrorism barriers, which are fantastically ugly around the front of the Palace of Westminster.

Now, that could be replaced by something equally effective, but a lot less obtrusive and a lot more aesthetically pleasing with a bit of decent design.

Intro: Yeah.

Mark D’Arcy: It’s also a processional space. Remember that you have just up the road at the C tar, you have the annual remembrance ceremonies. You have the state opening where his or her majesty appears in a carriage with, uh, a full military escort coming through that area.

So you need a space that’s adaptable for all those purposes. But you do want a place where people can come and look at Parliament without being confined to very narrow pavements and surrounded by vehicles. [00:36:00] And I think a redesign is not only overdue, but actually necessary. Now, I think there is a bit of a move now to more pedestrian friendly spaces in our cities, and it’s long overdue.

Yeah.

Ruth Fox: I mean, we did a report 15 years ago now, I can hardly believe, but it, it was called A Place for People Proposals for Enhancing Visitor Engagement with Parliament and s and in that we call for the Pedestrianisation of the Square. It’s part of the World’s Westminster World Heritage site. I think it’s the only World Heritage site in the world that’s got a main road going in the middle of way through, through it.

That affects how you approach a World Heritage site as a frequent visitor. Sometimes it feels quite dangerous at points. Yes. When you’re, you’re, you’re almost sort of pushed onto the road because of I, well, I’ve by near misses.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s not pleasant. It is periodically taken over by protesters and their voice is heard loudly.

The voice of everybody else is drowned out, and the square is surrounded by, for those [00:37:00] who are not very familiar with it, square is surrounded on the one side by Parliament alongside the Riverside. Then you’ve got Westminster Abbey, you’ve got the government buildings, the treasury, the Foreign Office, the cabin office, all the way up through Whitehall, and then on the fourth side, you’ve got the Supreme Court

Mark D’Arcy: in the old Westminster Guild Hall.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. So this is the constitutional heart of the nation. You know, you’ve got the Constitution writ large around that square. You’ve got the legislature, you’ve got the church, you’ve got the courts and the judiciary, and you’ve got the government and the civil service. There’s an enormous amount of history in the place.

I mean, one of the reasons we’ve got, the problems we’ve got with the traffic and so on is, and I think people perhaps are not familiar with this, is it’s the site of the first ever traffic lights, you know, effectively. Yeah, we call it a square, but really it’s a glorified roundabout. And it was historically, as I understand it, they had these traffic lights in order to manage the traffic, to enable in Victorian times the horse and carriage of [00:38:00] parliamentarians to get up to Victoria Station as quickly as possible.

Mark D’Arcy: Very important, vital constitutional function there. I suppose one of the downsides of attempting to do anything in this area is the archaeological issues that might then arise, because bear in mind, this has been one way or another, the centre of British government since before the Norman Conquest, when people talk about New Palace Yard in the environ of the Palace of Westminster, the new palace that I think they’re referring to is built by Edward the confessor, the pre Norman Monarch.

There’s a lot of archaeology potentially there. Now. Some of it has been wiped out by various developments over the years. When they built the current Victorian Palace of Westminster, they constructed a vast concrete raft for it to sit on, and that would’ve wiped out an enormous amount of archaeology right there.

When they built the underground carpark at the Palace of Westminster, a whole lot more went without much attempt to record the various, um, remains that were dug up at the time. There was once a [00:39:00] fountain in the square facing, uh, entrance to Westminster Hall, for example, and they, they found the foundations of those, dug them up and built the carpark and so on.

But right at the edges of that concrete raft and out of it, there may well be remains that need proper investigation and recording before things are built. But, uh, I think that’s a price worth paying. Frankly. I’m fascinated by the archaeology of this area. It was once called Forney Island, the whole marshy island on which they built first a church and then an abbey, and then because monks were literate and could add up, the Royal Court was attracted to that area in the Saxon Times, and you got Edward the Confessor, building his new palace next to his new Abbey, and Bob’s your uncle.

It became the centre, not just of British government, but as you say of the British Constitution. The administration was there. The church was there. Mm. So the remains around there will be fascinating for historians.

Ruth Fox: Yeah.

Mark D’Arcy: And ought to be investigated. But having said that, let’s build a centre to interpret all this, to tell visitors what they’re seeing.

Ruth Fox: Well, this is [00:40:00] where I think the debate about the future of the Square should link up with the debate about restoration and renewal. If anybody had any vision and ambition, this should be linked together. If there’s gonna be a decant from Parliament in order to facilitate the restoration works, then it is likely that the House of Lords, at least, if not the Commons, it seems the Lords is gonna move into the QE two centre.

The Queen Elizabeth, the second conference centre,

Mark D’Arcy: again, just up the road from

Ruth Fox: just up the square, just part of the security zone. It’s a bit of a car bunk call. I mean, I think it’s a protected building, but I mean, it’s a bit of a sort of

Mark D’Arcy: brutalist crimes against architecture.

Ruth Fox: Part

Mark D’Arcy: 27.

Ruth Fox: Yeah, it’s, it’s pretty ugly, but it’s large.

The government owns it, and the intention, like as I understand it, is that the Lords would move into there and have their chamber there on a temporary basis. Now we’ve argued that if the Lords were to do that, and then were to move back into the palace, the QE two conference centre, which at the moment, as I understand it, certainly didn’t use to make money.

When we looked at it in our report, it was a losing proposition, [00:41:00] which is why the government wanted to sell it off. But why not turn that into a Westminster World Heritage Visitor Centre? Mm. Most world heritage sites have a pretty decent visitor centre, and we know there’s already an enormous audience coming to Westminster, interested in the buildings, but not necessarily gonna go into Parliament or gonna go into the Abbey.

All the buildings have already got a footfall problem because there’s more people wanting to go in and they can accommodate. They’ve all got artefacts, treasures, documents, cultural stuff, artistic stuff that they can’t display. Because they’re not art galleries, they’re not museums. They’ve all got heritage items that people would be interested in.

Put it in a World Heritage Visitor Centre, share the proceeds between the institutions, use it to generate income to improve the sites and help support the building work. You could have a magnificent visitor centre there.

Mark D’Arcy: Mm. A truly great London Museum actually. I mean if you were to combine the kind of things that you have in [00:42:00] Westminster Abbey and the kind of things that you have in the Houses of Parliament.

Yeah. Effigies are the mediaeval King’s floating around in Westminster Aey. You’ve got the death warrant of Charles. The I Yep. Stuck up a tower in, I dunno if they’ve moved it now to the new National archives.

Ruth Fox: They, I think it’s on display in Parliament now, but yeah, most of the archives are now done in queue.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. All sorts of artefacts that, that are, are stuck away in remote corners of Parliament that could be put on display to the public and people would be fascinated by. So why not do that? The possibilities of this are endless and there would also be reasonably commercial possibilities and you could have payment for entrance and it would be quite an interesting place for people to go and it would hopefully support itself.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. And it, it’s a very large building in the conference centre and it’s got some fantastic views. So you do what I’ve seen in, in museums in, in Washington that do, for example, okay, you turn the top floor into a cafe and a restaurant with these Magnifi garden, magnificent Vistas garden. Yeah. You use it for hire.

I’m sure you probably get, some of the media companies have a media broadcast suite there looking out over the, the square. There’s, there’s, there’s some of possibilities there that worth exploring, [00:43:00] but it requires a bit of ambition and a bit of vision and, and a bit of leadership.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. And the other advantage of what you’re talking about, you touched on it a little bit.

There, is the security needs, particularly of visitors to Parliament at the moment. You queue for an awfully long time to get processed to go into Parliament and it’s happened to us on, on numerous occasions. ‘cause these days neither of us have parliamentary passes, but you’ll see lots of people queuing for very considerable time to get in, having the chance to have a bigger security processing area somewhere in all this, I’m not quite sure where, but somewhere in all this would be a considerable advantage.

One thing that’s always struck me as my pet idea, if you like for this, is that underneath Central Lobby where people go to lobby their MPs in Parliament, there is actually a kind of rotunda in its cellar and it’s a very large, very impressive space. Held up by cast iron pillars, but absolutely clogged with redundant pipe work, live steam lines, endless bunches of wires that nobody quite knows what they do anymore, where they [00:44:00] go everywhere.

If you could do an underground entrance from Parliament Square into. The Palace of Westminster itself. You have your security centre on Parliament Square. People go through a tunnel, come up there. It’s a very good, almost natural place to bring them into the main part of the palace. And then people who want to go to the committee corridor could take a lift up to the committee corridor.

People who wanted to meet their MPs could go into Central Lobby. People who wanted to go into the gallery of the House of Commons could find their way there all quite naturally. Mm. And you wouldn’t have the, the kind of uncomfortable flow of people being rooted around circuitous ways to get to the places they need to go inside the palace.

You could reconfigure things to make it much more visitor friendly. And that would help with having a, a, a much more open, transparent, observable democracy.

Ruth Fox: Oh, but Mark, you’re just talking about measures that are gonna waste money and gold plating restoration.

Mark D’Arcy: Terrible. A waste of money to spend it on, on democracy, obviously.

Ruth Fox: Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the critiques when the, the restoration and renewal proposals, the revised updated proposals were published was at the end of [00:45:00] last year, I think, or really this year, I’ve, I’ve lost track. There are proposals in there for improving visitor access and, and visitor engagement. And from memory, there is this image I’ve got in my mind of a kind of rotunda likes.

So, so they, that might be what they’re talking about. ‘cause I didn’t realise that there was this rotunda space under central lobby. Mm-hmm. Though, when you think about it, it makes sense. But you’ve been down there. I’ve never been done. I

Mark D’Arcy: was taken there on one of these tours to, to see the horrors of the actual guts of the palace of Westminster and why restoration and renewal is necessary.

And when you see the mess down there, this incredible tangle of pipes and wires and steam lines and the rest of it, you can see why the potential for it all going horribly wrong one day is very, very real indeed. It, it’s, it’s like the worst DIY project You can possibly imagine generations of it piled on top of it in kind of sedimentary layers.

Ruth Fox: But one of the things I understand within the, kind of the, the restoration and renewal. Group of parliamentarians that were looking at the proposals and sort of, you know, making decisions about what should go forward. [00:46:00] As I understand it, there was quite a lot of internal pressure in that group that one of the things that had to be considered was improving visitor access and investor engagement, which I think is absolutely right.

But then when the proposals came out and people saw these images in the documentation and looked at the, the costings, then for a lot of people who the natural critics of R&R, they don’t really want it to happen. And if they want it to happen, they want it. They think they know how best it can be done, it can be done much more cheaply and do it like naked down my makes

Mark D’Arcy: a builder and he said, do it for a tenner.

Yeah,

Ruth Fox: not quite that bad, but you, yes, you’re on those lines. And basically that was one of the avenues of critique that you’re wasting money goal plating on enhancing visitor access and visitor engagement. So we will see what happens. We haven’t got the date, of course, for the R&R debate yet. Yeah, we are, we’re getting towards the end of the year, still no date.

So, um, we’ll, yes,

Mark D’Arcy: they’ve, they’ve just published in the next two weeks, parliamentary schedule and a debate on restoration and renewal and whether MPs should move out, allow the works to take place is, has not happened again.

Ruth Fox: No. But, um, the longer this goes on, the more difficult it becomes and quite, [00:47:00] and obviously, uh, it’s now Andy Burnham’s problem, not Keir Starmer.

But ultimately, ultimately, if anything happens to the building, I’m afraid the Prime Minister who’s in office will be the one who has to carry the can.

Mark D’Arcy: Yeah. So, as I keep saying this, this will be a bit close to the bone as a symbol of bought in Britain. Yeah, I think that probably brings us to the end of, uh, this week’s podcast, Ruth.

We’ll, of course, be back next week with much more exciting parliamentary Arana I for your de lactation and delight.

Ruth Fox: Yes, listeners. So, uh, if you’re enjoying this podcast and, uh, you’re getting the parliamentary nerdy, if you’re enjoying it, do remember to subscribe if you haven’t already done so in your podcast app and like, and, uh, rate and reviewers on your, your app, whether you’re listening on, uh, on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube follow, uh, Parliament matters, uh, ‘cause it really helps to grow the audience and, uh, and crack those algorithms.

So I’ll see you next week, Mark.

Mark D’Arcy: Goodbye for now.

Ruth Fox: Bye for now.

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 @HansardSociety.