The Restoration and Renewal (R&R) program, set up to deliver the long-delayed overhaul of the palace, warns of serious risks from fire, flooding, crumbling stonework and aging mechanical and electrical systems.<\/p>\n
Parliament needs fixing \u2014 and in the coming weeks, MPs and peers are expected to vote on what to do next.<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s little consensus on how to proceed. The fight over the future of the site is now pitting politicians worried about spiraling costs against those who think the need to act is growing more urgent by the day. As this week\u2019s POLITICO Westminster Insider podcast explores, fixing parliament is a story of seemingly endless division and delay.<\/p>\n
Two options, eye-watering numbers<\/p>\n
The way forward, presented to MPs and peers by the R&R team, has been boiled down to two stark options.<\/p>\n
The first is the so-called \u201cfull decant.\u201d This would involve moving MPs and peers out of the palace to allow major works to be carried out. On current estimates, it would take 19 to 24 years and cost up to \u00a315.6 billion.<\/p>\n
The second is an even slower, staged approach \u2014 catchily named \u201cEnhanced Maintenance and Improvement plus\u201d(EMI+) \u2014 where only the House of Lords is moved out, and works are done in phases while MPs\u2019 parliamentary business continues on the estate. But that could take 38 to 61 years and cost up to \u00a339.2 billion, the program\u2019s figures suggest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Restoration and Renewal (R&R) program, set up to deliver the long-delayed overhaul of the palace, warns of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1934,894,2793,626,2358,3363,459,628,65727,461,17373,59,57,58,464,12174,50,423,471,1352,56,54,55,93754],"class_list":["post-460075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-aging","tag-banks","tag-buildings","tag-canada","tag-carbon","tag-cost-of-living","tag-crisis","tag-democracy","tag-edward-leigh","tag-elections","tag-footprint","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-infrastructure","tag-kemi-badenoch","tag-news","tag-parliament","tag-safety","tag-services","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-westminster-insider"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}