Britain’s Broken Parliament
Britain’s Parliament is broken—and it has nothing to do with Brexit.
What plagues the Palace of Westminster, where the two houses of the British Parliament sit, runs deeper than the politics happening inside it. Specifically, it goes all the way down to the basement. Below its iconic towers and Commons Chamber lie poor ventilation, outdated plumbing, and a labyrinth of pipes and cabling entangled by decades of shoddy, ad hoc repairs. The state of the UNESCO World Heritage Site is so dire that a parliamentary assessment in 2016 described it as a “tale of decay, disrepair, and dilapidation.”
Parliament, which has resided in the palace since the 16th century, last year approved a multibillion-pound Restoration and Renewal Program for the building that is scheduled to begin in the mid-2020s. The bulk of the refit will focus on areas of the palace that most of its 1 million annual visitors will never see, and involve a full evacuation of the building that will require relocating members of Parliament to temporary venues nearby for five to eight years. Absent a detailed plan for what the refurbishment will ultimately entail—and at what cost—it could take much longer.
But renovating a royal palace, which Westminster officially remains, is more than just an issue of logistics. It comes with the country bitterly divided over its looming exit from the European Union, at a moment when virtually all the political air has been consumed by Brexit, leaving lawmakers with little time or capacity to debate what stands to be the mother of all parliamentary refurbishments.
Should the effort be a straightforward refit—one that addresses the basic problems
