To Planet Glue, that far-flung place where life-forms with exalted titles discuss a project to repair the Palace of Westminster.
It could cost £39billion and will not start until 2032 at the earliest. Some officials have already toiled on it for 14 years.
In that time they have developed their own language, burrowing so far into the bureaucratic subsoil that normal bodily functions have withered.
The blind cusk eel swims at such dark depths that its eyes no longer work.
Likewise, officials attached to parliamentary ‘R&R’ (restoration and renewal) have lost all sense of scepticism about costs. Yesterday’s event was a meeting of the public accounts committee, one of Parliament’s better outfits.
What a feast R&R has become for officials and prospective contractors. For more than a decade the Establishment has accepted that the palace needs a fortune spending on its crumbling towers and tangled pipes; as the years pass it becomes hard to remember how many billions of pounds are involved.
Thus the figures rise, like the girl in the old Nimble bread adverts, and no one complains.
Before the committee sat two of the project’s current managers: Charlotte Simmonds, ‘managing director at R&R client team’ and ‘senior responsible officer’, plus Russ MacMillan, ‘chief executive of the R&R delivery authority’. What curlicues to flourish on LinkedIn!
Charlotte Simmonds, ‘managing director at R&R client team’ and ‘senior responsible officer’. What curlicues to flourish on LinkedIn, writes Quentin Letts
Charlotte and Russ – the committee uses Christian names, please – both spoke the lingo: resilience, full decant, EMI (enhanced maintenance and improvement), strategic estates, design maturity, next levels, retiring the risks, consent groups, iterate, sub-boards, external dependencies, mitigations, moving into delivery, upticks, following due process, granular level, delegation levels, escalating up to the clerks, triangulation, scenario planning and, naturally, best practice.
Charlotte did a lot of hand-waving. She may have thought this helped to convey a sense of executive purpose. To me it simply suggested a bluffer. They had come to try to frighten the MPs into approving phase one of the works, which would be capped at £3billion. Peanuts! If parliamentarians did not agree to this by the end of the year there was going to be terrible trouble. Things were going to become more expensive, just you see.
Holiday companies use a similar tactic when you start booking a trip and the message flashes up, ‘only two rooms left at this price’. You panic and press the button and wrongly think you have bagged a bargain.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Con, N Cotswolds), 73, who chairs the committee and who is a chartered surveyor, was curious how the £3billion figure for phase one had been reached.
Charlotte rattled through some of the costings: £320million on designers, £90million on surveys, £70million on a temporary jetty on the Thames, £328million for storing ‘heritage works’, by which she meant either oil paintings or perhaps Sir Geoffrey himself. Just clearing the scaffolding and clutter from the palace’s current spine road was going to cost £30million. These were astonishing sums, produced almost with pride.
Planning permission alone was going to take a year. Nothing moves slowly in officialdom, you see. The longer they delay, the longer their class stays in a job.
Catherine McKinnell (Lab, Newcastle N) suggested that it all sounded rather vague. ‘There’s lots of potential for elasticity in there.’ Russ’s eyes bulged, not so much in indignation, I think, as surprise. It was as if no one had ever put such a point to him. Sarah Hall (Lab, Warrington S) expressed mild doubt about the supervision of costs. Charlotte, with a wave of the hand: ‘It would obviously be profiled.’ Eh?
‘Experts’ were invoked a lot. ‘We draw in independent experts,’ yacked Charlotte. ‘We have also utilised consultancy support.’ Now the prices perhaps started to make more sense. She insisted phase one was ‘a really pragmatic way to get momentum on this programme’.
Translation: once MPs have swallowed this initial £3billion there will be no turning back and we can really open the gold taps.



You must be logged in to post a comment Login