Holocaust Memorial Bill

Report

My Lords, before we start, I remind the House that a lot of people will be watching this debate, and of the importance of being mindful of the tone of contributions. This Bill, understandably, stirs passionate and strongly held views across the House from different perspectives, as has been seen at earlier stages. I am sure that noble Lords will continue to uphold the best traditions of the House to speak and argue freely, alongside courtesy and respect for those both inside and outside the Chamber. I wrote to all noble Lords in September, alongside the usual channels, to remind everyone of those courtesies. I ask noble Lords to be mindful, in particular, of our Standing Order to

“be careful to avoid personally insulting or offensive speeches, which offend the customary courtesy of the House”.

I am grateful in advance to noble Lords, and I look forward to constructive debates.

Clause 1: Expenditure relating to a Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre

Amendment 1

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 10, leave out from “of” to end of line 11 and insert “£75 million provided by Parliament and grants from The Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust.”

My Lords, in discussing funding and expenditure, I will consider the present funding and whether there are restrictions on how the money can be properly spent. This will entail consideration of the plans to build the Adjaye/Arad building in Victoria Tower Gardens.

The Holocaust memorial and accompanying learning centre are to be constructed in accordance with the recommendations made in Britain’s Promise to Remember, as accepted by Prime Minister Cameron in Methodist Central Hall on 27 January 2015. The then Prime Minister highlighted two recommendations. First, Britain should have a

“striking and prominent new National Memorial”

in central London. Secondly, there should be a “world-class learning centre” to accompany the national memorial. The Prime Minister also announced the creation of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, in response to the recommendation that there immediately be a permanent independent body to manage the project. He made the promise of £50 million of public money to kick-start fundraising, which was later increased to £75 million.

Page 53 of Britain’s Promise to Remember says:

“The Commission proposes that the permanent body seek to raise money from business and private philanthropy and that the government should match this, pound for pound, up to an agreed limit”.

That proposal has not been accepted; there is no permanent independent body and the Prime Minister’s kick-start has been ignored. Will my noble friend on the Front Bench and the Minister tell the House why the promoter made and maintains the decision not to implement these two recommendations from the commission?

Further, there has been no alternative effort to raise civil society money. Many memorials have been funded by civil society and the commission looked for philanthropy to show the way. Since 2019 there has been the Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust, but no money has been raised. Funding and expenditure decisions are now necessary and urgent; the only funds available are the £75 million of public money. In the present circumstances, that needs to be accepted as a limit. In contrast, for the trustees of the charity, there is no limit; depending on the public’s response, the sky is the limit. Thus for funding there is £75 million and, prospectively, an unknown sum in charitable grants. The formal position remains that these funds must be spent on the commission’s recommendations. As the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation says, it is

My Lords, bearing in mind the instructions that have come, it is the aim of all of us who oppose this project to be constructive; we want to improve it. It is not about nimbyism, or even the location, but delivering something worthy of the cause: worthy, as I say to myself, of the losses in my own family, which is what has driven me for the last nine years or so. It is in that spirit that we bring forward these amendments.

I support the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, in drawing attention to the financial non-management of this project in an era when every penny counts, and when proper education about the Jewish community of this country is crying out for funding and reform. The costs have escalated beyond the original estimates, without even a spade in the ground. The available figures are about two years old, no allowance for inflation has been made, the contingency is far higher than usual, private funds have not been identified publicly and, as I will come to, there is no management control.

As I have said before, I am struck by the contrast with the planned expenditure on a fitting memorial to the late Queen, reportedly to be erected, together with a space for pause and reflection, in Saint James’s Park at a cost of £46 million. The project will include the replacement of the Blue Bridge and is going to be ready in 2026. If such fiscal restraint is good enough for our late Queen, surely something has gone adrift in the financial plans for the memorial.

The petitioners before the Select Committee on the Bill asked that the Government present for the approval of Parliament a report on the capital and operating costs of the project, as well as the financial sustainability of the entity that will execute and operate it, before they present any new or amended proposal for planning permission. I have not seen such a financial report.

The original Government grant was £50 million; that has been raised to £75 million, and we believe the total cost will now be nearly £200 million. The latest estimate was made a couple of years ago.

Construction costs are bound to rise because this is an historical site. Victoria Tower Gardens is very close to the river. If noble Lords have walked there, they will know that the ground oozes underfoot when it is raining and it is a fair bet that obstacles relating to water and archaeological finds will emerge if digging ever starts. About £20 million has been spent so far, with nothing to show for it. There is a specific charity fundraising for the private element, but we have heard nothing about its success. Can the Minister tell us how the funding has been settled and how much has been raised privately, and from where?

In 2022 the National Audit Office was highly critical of the department’s performance in planning, preparing and managing the project to date. It was particularly anxious about the management of the project and the unexplained escalation in costs. It noted the promoters’ failure to consider any alternative site or to consider the risks and litigation that have arisen. All this got a complacent response from the department—that all was well, with no changes in management and no transparency.

Operating costs are also a mystery. The Government have pledged free entry to the learning centre, provided, of course, that visitors book in advance online. Operating costs are estimated to have risen to £8 million a year, while the cost of security is a big unknown. The Government had hoped to make some money from the learning centre by opening it for conferences, even in the evening, but it would be a most unattractive site, open to the elements and risks of various sorts. Extra expenditure would be required to run it out of hours, not to mention disturbance to the neighbours. Can the Minister tell us about the operating costs and what plans there are to commercialise the space?

There has been no allowance for the endowment fund, which was a recommendation of the then Prime Minister’s 2015 commission report. The endowment fund was to be used for education. That is another abandoned aim—there will be more to be said on that.

As for the management, the National Audit Office commented that the then Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities

“does not have a track record of managing programmes of this nature”.

The NAO report showed that nine bodies under the Secretary of State will have input into the management of the project. It involves the Cabinet, the Treasury, three advisory boards, an investment sub-committee and a charitable fundraising arm, chaired by Sir Gerald Ronson. We have heard nothing from any of them. What is missing is a delivery board and regular reports on expenditure.

If the scheme collapses, as is not impossible—the designer’s latest scheme, a cathedral in Accra, now stands as an abandoned empty plot, with the Ghanaian Government looking into the costing—who will be held accountable? It is almost impossible to find out who is actually in charge but, looking at such sources as are available, the boards are heavily populated by politicians and donors, as distinct from experts, and the academic input is seemingly designed to further a political objective. In a time of alleged fiscal responsibility, and if the Government want this project to get off the ground—or rather, under the ground—we need to know who is responsible and where the funding is. Will the Minister please tell us how the Government are going to get a grip?

My Lords, I intervene very briefly, as I have in Grand Committee previously, as the Minister and shadow Minister are aware, to make clear my position on this proposal. I am strongly in favour of a Holocaust memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. I am strongly in favour of a learning centre of good, adequate size that can be of a standard that we would like to see ensured.

All of us sitting here know, as does anyone who has discussed this seriously, that it cannot be done if you try to do it underground in Victoria Tower Gardens. I have great sympathy for the Minister and the shadow Minister because they are both committed; they are obliged to present this. I am sure they believe in it genuinely, but it is the reality that, in the times of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, when it was put to him merely to have the memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, it was originally proposed that the learning centre would be somewhere else. Then a problem arose over where that somewhere else was, so somebody approached the noble Lord again and he agreed for it to be put into Victoria Tower Gardens, which was not the original proposal.

We understand perfectly well that both the previous and present Governments desperately fear that they might be accused of antisemitism. In the very emotional circumstances that exist at the moment, with all the horrors of Gaza, the two-state solution and the whole Israel situation up in the air—today the Government announced the sanctioning of two senior members of the present Israeli cabinet—this could not be a more emotional and difficult time, and people are very concerned not to be accused of antisemitism. But it is quite clear that the people who will be guilty of antisemitism in the end are those who are proposing this arrangement, because it will never happen.

I have some personal involvement in construction issues in London, and there is no question but that the construction industry has some real problems, including a shortage of skilled people. It is not necessarily going to be the most attractive place to work, with the risk of the sort of demonstrations and other things that will take place. I have not had an answer to the question of whether anybody has yet undertaken to be prepared to quote for this job. If they have agreed to do it, will they in the end be able to honour it, having found some of their employees and skilled men not keen to carry it out?

My Lords, I will briefly endorse some of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, about building costs. He has much more experience in the world of construction than I do, but it is a matter that is both of interest to people and very important more generally.

We all know that since Covid there has been huge cost inflation in the building industry, partly because of the difficulty in assessing specialist forms of construction. This project falls into a category where generalised prediction is really not very helpful, for all the kinds of reasons that the noble Lord mentioned about the site and the nature of the processes involved in developing it.

When we think about this—it is a relevant consideration to us all—it is worth our while thinking about some well-known parliamentary projects. I think it was the case that the Scottish Parliament overshot 11 times its original budget. This—I am glad to be able to say—was worse than Portcullis House, which in 2000 was estimated to be £80 million over its original budget. That was only roughly half the overshot per square metre of the Scottish Parliament. We need to be very cognisant of the problems that are faced in the financial aspect of all this.

The Government assure us that they have been advised by experts, although, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, we have not seen any detail about all this, as the Government say that they cannot disclose commercially sensitive information into the public domain. Well, fair enough, but no doubt the Government were advised by similar—if not the same—experts on those other two projects, which seem to have been rather inaccurately valued at the outset.

Frankly, as far as costs go, I can see no reason to have any confidence in the amounts that we hear for this scheme, which, after all—as I think has been mentioned already—have gone up from £50 million in 2015 to £137 million now. Like the noble Lord, Lord King, the only thing that I am confident about is that if this project were to go ahead, that will turn out to be an underestimate.

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, as I have been for nearly a decade, and a resident of Westminster who walks my dog in the park.

I remind us all that this is Report, not Second Reading, and I will attempt to resist the huge temptation to remind noble Lords that the foundation considered more than 50 sites and that there is huge value in collocating the memorial with the learning centre— I could go on. Instead, I would just like to focus on this actual amendment.

We all know that putting the costs in nominal pounds in the Bill is a bad idea. It does not matter what the building is or what we are trying to do: putting costs in a Bill makes for bad legislation. Each of the speeches we have heard today has been a Second Reading speech, because this is really an amendment designed to wreck the memorial. I think we should be honest about that.

We should not put costs in the Bill. It is not surprising that the costs have escalated over the last decade—we have been living through a period of very high inflation. We have not put a spade in the ground precisely because of the planning process that has taken so long. This is not unique to the Holocaust memorial; sadly, it is a fact of life for every major building project in this country, which is a subject for a much broader debate.

It is not surprising that fundraising has not been started, because it cannot be until there is planning permission to build something. So I am afraid that the arguments being used in favour of this amendment are actually arguments against a Second Reading of the Bill, and therefore we should dismiss them.

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am also a member of the foundation. In fact, I am one of the co-chairs and trustees. I can confirm what the noble Baroness said: we cannot start fundraising until there is planning permission.