Parliament‘ should be evacuated for repairs’

Mcs warned of risks of fire and sewage while restoration will cost billions

The Palace of Westminster needs to be evacuated for multi-billion-pound emergency repairs if it is to avoid the increasing risk of being ravaged by fire or swamped in a sewerage flood, MPs have been warned.

Labour MP Chris Bryant, who is joint spokesman for the Committee on Restoration and Renewal, made the dire predictions as he argued against colleagues who want the work to take place around them.

But even the fast-track repair option would take an estimated six years, and cost taxpayers around £3.5 billion.

The chairman of the Commons Treasury Committee Andrew Tyrie said at the weekend that insufficient evidence had been produced to justify the restoration plan.

Yet as the Press Association was given a rare tour of the warren of subterranean corridors which make up the palace’s underbelly, the scale of the problem was obvious as bird’s nest-like bunches of telephone wires dangled precariously from the walls. Palace of Westminster repairs in numbers:

Estimated cost of repairs if both houses of parliament move temporally to other sites – £3.5 billion over four to six years.

Estimated cost of repairs if work is done while MPs and Lords remain on site – £5.7bn over 32 years.

Rooms in the palace – 1,180. Staircases – 126. Windows – 4,000. Levels – Seven. Hawks patrolling the palace skies – Two .

Length of basement corridors – 1.25 miles.

Length of above ground corridors – 1.9 miles.

Length of building – 984ft.

Miles of cabling – 252.

Fire detection devices – 6,969.

Fire extinguishers – 1,500.

A mass of 252 miles of electrical cables scrambled along the ceilings as they vied for space with huge gas pipes and the steam central hearing system which sends temperatures soaring in hotspots across the cramped underground gangways.

Mr Bryant noted it was “ironic” that one of the “catastrophic failures” that risked endangering the building could come from a sewerage flood from the Victorian drainage system.

MPs had been expected to vote on the recommendations of the Restoration Committee this month but Mr Bryant, who favours full evacuation of the Commons and Lords to other sites from 2023, fears the Government is delaying the debate.

Some estimates have concluded that doing the major repairs while both Houses of Parliament stayed put could see the work stretched out to 32 years at a cost of £5.7 billion.

The Houses of Parliament require multi-billion-pound repairs.