Last week, the Restoration and Renewal Client Board published its costed proposals for saving the Palace of Westminster. The options have been narrowed to two: a full decant costing up to £15.6 billion over 20 to 25 years, or a semi-decant that could take 60 years and cost approaching £40 billion. A £3 billion first phase of works would begin this year.
The debate that follows will focus, as it always does, on where to put MPs while the building is fixed. Richmond House? The QEII Conference Centre? How big should the temporary chamber be?
But there is a more interesting question, and it is one that liberals should be leading on: why do we still assume that 650 MPs need to be in the same building at all?
We already know this works
During the pandemic, the Commons went hybrid. MPs participated remotely in questions, statements, and debates. Select committees took evidence from witnesses across the country and the world. Electronic voting functioned securely. The Hansard Society found that remote committee work was one of the most valuable innovations of the period, and Liberal Democrat MPs were among the highest users of hybrid participation.
Then Jacob Rees-Mogg ended it, forcing a return to physical-only proceedings without even allowing a debate on extending the arrangements. The Hansard Society called the decision “over-hasty, poorly thought-through, unwise and unnecessary.” MPs with disabilities, caring responsibilities, and constituencies hundreds of miles from London were simply shut out.
That decision was wrong then. Revisiting it now, when Parliament faces its biggest logistical crisis in a generation, is not just sensible. It is a democratic opportunity.
This is a liberal argument
The case for hybrid working is not really about technology or convenience. It is about who gets to participate in democracy and on what terms.
Westminster’s culture of presenteeism is a filter. It selects for people who can spend four days a week in London, maintain two homes, endure late-night votes, and have no caring responsibilities that conflict with an unpredictable schedule. It penalises MPs with disabilities, new parents, and anyone whose constituency is not a short train ride from SW1. It concentrates political power in London and weakens the connection between MPs and the communities they represent.
Liberals have always understood that institutions are not neutral. They shape who participates, whose voice is heard, and how power is distributed. A Parliament that requires permanent physical presence in central London is not a level playing field. It is a system designed by and for a particular kind of person, and it excludes others by default.
Hybrid working would not eliminate the demands of the job, but it would make those demands compatible with a wider range of lives. That is not a perk. It is a basic condition for a more representative democracy.
The building becomes something better
If MPs do not all need to be physically present every day, the restored Palace can become more than a private workplace. The Hansard Society has proposed turning the QEII Conference Centre into a World Heritage Site Visitor Centre, with exhibition space and public access to Parliament’s archives. The Reichstag in Berlin shows how a working parliament and genuine public engagement can coexist in the same building, drawing three million visitors a year while legislation continues inside.
The Palace of Westminster belongs to the public. After a restoration costing billions of public money, it should be accessible to the public, not locked behind security barriers so that politicians can conduct business that could happen anywhere.
What liberals should be calling for
A permanent hybrid model: major debates and key accountability sessions in person, select committees and routine votes operating remotely as standard. Electronic voting to replace the division lobbies. Procedural safeguards, set by the House collectively, to prevent the executive exploiting remote working to weaken backbench scrutiny. And a vision for the restored Palace as a living democratic space, not just a refurbished office.
The Liberal Democrats already champion proportional representation, votes at 16, and democratic renewal. This is the natural next step. Parliament is not a building. It is a practice. The building is falling down, and that gives us the chance to rethink the practice. Liberals should be making that case loudly, and now.
A longer version of this essay can be found here.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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18 Comments
Thank you for a timely and interesting article.
Who is responsible for the ongoing failure to maintain this national building?
In which ways is the physically binary structure of a second hand chapel/church aid discussion and cooperative purpose/discusion which better promotes real democracy?
Why not have a semi-circle or horseshoe layout in a cheaper part of Britain?
The idea of spending £15Bn to £40Bn on a such a building project is frankly disgusting. I trust our MPs will oppose this sort of spending – on a building – in the strongest possible terms.
That rethink could also consider the shape of the “Whole UK” Parliament after the implementation of Lib Dem federalism.
I’d be up for simply ditching the idea that Parliament needs to be in London at all and just move it to a new site next to Birmingham International Station (close to the traditional centre of England at Meriden). A new building would cost far less than £15.6 billion to build, even if we had the same builders who were responsible for the Scottish Parliament and the cost of just making the old building safe would be much less than the cost of returning Parliamentarians to it. I’ve no doubt that there are hoteliers who would jump at the opportunity of running the Palace of Westminster Hotel.
@Jaimie Dobson. . .and its location. I suggest York
An interesting article, that I found myself nodding appreciatively with until I came across the one single jarring sentence
“Electronic voting functioned securely.”
Now I know Lib Dems have great faith in technology and progress, but there is one simple question that shakes the very foundations of electronic voting and that is ‘How do you verify to all sides satisfaction that it is correct?’
We all know the claims of the MAGA movement that the vote counting machines in the 2020 election were rigged. Some of us were somewhat surprised that every one of the identified swing states were all won by Trump, but the Democrat campaign really was absolute pants. But if Trump or his Republican successor wins again in 2035 will we be at all sure that Trump hasn’t been able to subvert the system? There really is no way to verify results at all, because there is nothing to check against except totals generated by the vote counting systems themselves.
Now I accept parliament with its usual state of whipped if party loyalty and only 650 votes to count of with only two options is much easier to have confidence in, but if Jenrick and Braverman checked the records and claimed that the system had mis-recorded their electronic vote, and being online there was no equivalent mechanism to the fact that this time people saw them walk through the wrong lobby, how could we decide?
I would say a building near Birmingham,a bit more central to the UK. Parliament itself can become a tourist haunt.
Absolute trust in computing – not me. Absolute trust in the integrity of parliamentarians – not me. Reasonable level of trust in proven mechanisms to allow votes to be independently verified by both sides after the event – it’s about as good as it can get.
That’s why I have severe doubts in STV mechanisms (larger votes almost have to be counted and reallocated by computer), and also online votes in conference. How can we call for a recount when we don’t know and aren’t even told what the online vote was?
Ultimately if an extreme authoritarian party wins a general election in the UK be it Red, Yellow, Blue of any shade, Green, or Nationalist, what confidence will we have five years later that the results are sound?
How many decades did it take for that which came over the Horizon to be undone anyone?
How many bills will have been passed, budgets enacted etc if we go to electronic voting and then find it has gone wrong? Would we ever be allowed to find out?
Can we move Parliament to Blaenau Gwent in SE Wales?
Affordable housing, good transport links and an area much in need of regeneration.
It makes no sense at all to spend £60 billion on a pile of old stones on a Thames mudbank.
@David Evans: If you want that kind of trust with electronic voting and STV, the most likely way to achieve it is for voting machines to record the vote electronically AND automatically mark a piece of paper, which is shown to the voter (so the voter can see that it’s been marked correctly). Then the results are counted automatically, but a random sample of constituencies are then verified by hand by counting the paper slips (perhaps with each party able to request specific constituencies to be verified. Only a sample because with STV hand-counting is a LOT of work).
Of course for MPs voting in Parliament no such verification is needed. Each MP’s vote is public, so it’s very easy for any member of the public to tot up who voted which way and so verify the results are correct.
Parliament is a UNESCO world heritage site.
Seems like some would want that turned into a Travelodge or just left to rot as a pile of bricks on the mud by the Thames. Cultural vandalism. Obviously they wouldn’t be happy unless we’ve a nondescript eyesore remiscent of a 70s polytechnic in a city that’s not even the capital. The price of everything – but the value of nothing.
@Craig Levene
The Palace of Westminster does not have to continue as the seat of the UK’s parliament to retain its World Heritage Site listing. At considerable lesser cost than may be needed to repair and improve the building for use as a parliament over the next century, it could be turned into perhaps one of the world’s premier tourist attractions, being able to manage a far greater flow of tourists if the parliamentarians and staff were moved elsewhere.
I like the idea of modernising working practices and introducing some hybrid working. But that doesn’t solve the issue that you still need to put MPs (and for that matter Peers) somewhere for the in-person parts of their jobs, so where should that be while the Parliamentary buildings are vacated for the safety/renovation work? Personally I think we should look at permanently repurposing the QEII Centre for that. Possibly hybrid working would reduce the amount of outfitting required to make it completely suitable?
Hello Simon (Robinson), I don’t **want** that kind of trust in democracy. I believe **We need** that kind of trust.
So far there has not been a general election where the overall result has been seriously questioned in the UK. That to a large extent has been the case for many decades, where activists of all parties can attend and question individual votes at the count and can see the votes physically pile up for each candidate. That coupled with the absence of the huge polarisation of those involved means the system largely produces a verifiable result at each constituency that is available within 24 hours and is accepted immediately by all. That is a key part of the bedrock that supports our democracy.
Regarding your suggestion of printing a ballot to show to the voter – it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as good as the current system for verifiability. What if a voter claims it wasn’t how he voted? Some mechanism that allows a vote to be changed? Equally only testing a small sample, but with say 6 member constituencies, your random sample would have to include verifying all six winners and with say 30,000 actual voters, voting for five or six parties, could you feasibly do an easily verifiable manual count in time so that things that are found to be wrong can be demonstrated to be put right, in an immediately verifiable manner?
Reducing the number of voters and MPs per constituency massively reduces proportionality.
The mother of all parliaments – one of the greatest debating chambers in the world – reduced to some zoom call meetings to align with modern working practices – much loved by the lanyard army. There are plenty of new parents , and people with disabilities who make sacrifices every day – working in a job and earning a salary that most MPs could never envisage or survive on. Seems like the sole purpose is to make those on a salary of £90k + benefits that most could only imagine & make their work/life balance a little easier…
What about the rest of us.
There is a lot to be said for MPs being physically in a debating chamber, where the mood of the house is easier to assess than on line. However, MPs are often in meeting rooms, and have to leave very briefly to vote, as instructed by the party whip, in a debate they haven’t attended. It is also the case that the February 5th debate about Gaza was overwhelmingly condemnatory of the government, as most such debates have been during the genocidal war in Gaza, and none of them has had the slightest effect on government policy.
Regarding electronic voting, it’s true that witnessing a count in a local or general election provides reassurance. Thousands of votes are involved, and some kind of skulduggery could happen if we weren’t able to see the sealed boxes being opened and tipped out. Manipulation of a maximum of 650 electronic records would be much harder to conceal, and being found out would be catastrophic for the party involved.
Of course, another consequence might be that many more votes would be cast if turning up in Westminster wasn’t necessary. That might make MPs more accountable to their constituencies, but on the other hand they might end up voting about things they knew little about, to keep their voting record at a high percentage for purely cosmetic reasons. There are a lot of potentially unforeseen consequences of allowing hybrid or remote voting.
@Andy Daer “Manipulation of a maximum of 650 electronic records would be much harder to conceal, and being found out would be catastrophic for the party involved.”
Basically impossible to conceal; it isn’t a secret ballot so it would be immediately obvious to the MPs.
@David Evans
I have some sympathy with regard to your worries about STV counts. I would require two, independent, systems running different software for counting the vote, NASA-style, both “air-gapped” so no remote access was possible and guarded in the same way the boxes of votes are. I would also, post-facto, randomly select a number of constituencies to manually count; there is no reason why the verification count could not happen over the weekend following the election, with the results certified in time for Parliament to sit on the Monday, if a short gap between election and sitting of the new members is considered desirable.
This would, of course, be more expensive that a FPTP election, but I am always wary of arguments that suggest we should do democracy in the cheapest way possible! In any case, STV is used successfully on the island of Ireland,in Scotland, and in Malta so I don’t think the problems are insurmountable.