Anger at parliament's £10m front door that doesn't work properly

Times

2 days ago

It should have been an open and shut case: installing a new front door to help make the House of Lords more secure.
Yet peers have described the project as 'a complete white elephant and a disaster': the bill has ballooned to £9.6 million and the door still does not open properly. In March 2022, when the project was approved, it was expected to cost £6.1 million.
Contractors began an upgrade of the peers' entrance, one of the doors to the Palace of Westminster, just off Abingdon Street, in 2023. Two years later, it still requires a member of staff to be present around the clock to press a button to open it.
The Lords said the refit was so expensive because it included 'significant structural and groundworks both inside and outside the Palace, as well as the diversion of below-ground services'.
The costs rose sharply due to 'changes to the planned working pattern of the project to minimise disruption to the House', technical problems caused by the discovery of buried historic vaults in the Unesco world heritage site, and rescheduling due to unplanned ceremonial events.
The redesign has been done by DBR, a company that specialises in building restoration, and which removed the graffiti from Sir Winston Churchill's statue in Westminster and helped to restore the roof of Blenheim Palace near Oxford, where Churchill was born.
Last week, peers made clear their displeasure at the rising cost and the fact that the door was unfit for purpose, recently leaving a member who uses a wheelchair unable to get inside.
'I suspect that the costs of the front door make it one of the most expensive front doors in the world, and it is a front door that does not work,' Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, 70, who served as a minister in John Major's cabinet, said in the Lords recently.
'I do not wish to … underestimate the difficulties of dealing with a historic building of this kind, but it is simply not acceptable that public money should be spent in this way with such disastrous consequences … It is a complete white elephant and a disaster.'
Peers have made clear their displeasure at the rising costs and the fact that the door is unfit for purpose
AARON CHOWN/POOL PHOTO/AP
ALAMY
Forsyth added that peers had said the redesign would not work. 'Various members from all sides of the House protested [that]… it would result in people having to queue outside to get in and they would therefore be more vulnerable,' he said. 'We were told that no, it had been carefully designed and the system had been looked at, but we now discover that we need somebody permanently there to press the button to open the door.'
The Labour peer Lord Berkeley, 85, said that he had been informed that this was the first time such a design had been used. 'Why should we be guinea pigs?' he asked. 'We believe in precedent here for a large number of different things, but not in being a guinea pig for a kind of door that clearly does not work. Portcullis House has doors that seem to work all right. Did no one test it first? On the question of professional indemnity, is anyone going to be found to be at fault here?'
The leader of the Lords, Baroness Smith of Basildon, responded: 'On the door itself, there are two issues, cost and operability. It is completely unacceptable that we have a door that does not operate as it should. It is important that we are secure, so the costs of the door are very high. It is not just the security issue but also the heritage issue.'
Forsyth said the Lords authorities had repeatedly refused to tell members the total cost of the door until now, claiming that doing so could help terrorists plotting attacks.
Improving security at the peers' entrance was one of a number of recommendations put forward in a review that followed the Westminster terror attack in 2017. Sir Jon Murphy, the former chief constable of Merseyside police, was asked to look at ways to tighten perimeter security.
The House of Lords said: 'The work at peers' entrance is an important project as part of our commitment to ensure the safety and security of everyone who works on and visits the parliamentary estate. We are working with our contractors to address and resolve ongoing issues with the door at Peers' Entrance, at no extra cost to the public.'