Why is R&R needed?

The Palace of Westminster is an iconic building, an international landmark, a workplace for thousands and a destination for more than a million visitors every year. It sits at the heart of the UNESCO Westminster World Heritage Site, and is the historic home of the UK Parliament. 
On a site with 1,000 years of history, the majority of the Palace is Victorian with some significantly older areas; over time its services and technology have deteriorated and are increasingly in need of repair or replacement. Significant work is needed to restore and renew the building, and a decision is now needed on how to start this work. 

The challenges include:

• Only 12% of the Palace currently has step-free access.
• On average, each month, maintenance teams respond to around 2,900 reactive jobs and work on 380 small projects.
• Reactive maintenance tasks increased by 70% between 2021/22 and 2023/24.

Since 2016, there have been: 

• 36 fire incidents;
• 12 asbestos incidents; and
• 19 stonemasonry incidents.

Investment and work is ongoing to ensure the ongoing safety of visitors and people who work in Parliament. But the Palace’s services and technology are increasingly in need of repair or replacement. There has been no overall renovation of the Palace since partial rebuilding in 1945-50 and some services are much older than this.

While restoration is complex, costly and time-consuming, we know from recent public polling that 72% of people think the Palace should be protected for future generations. 

How is the building currently managed? 

The Palace is kept safe by in-house teams who manage essential and substantial maintenance, repair and refurbishment work around parliamentary business. Currently, about £1.5m is spent per week maintaining and repairing the Palace of Westminster. 

Continuing in the same way is unsustainable and will lead to an expensive managed decline of the Palace of Westminster. Recent advice from an independent expert panel is that the significant legacy issues that create safety, functionality and accessibility challenges for  those working in and visiting the Palace can only be fully resolved by project(s) of the scale envisaged by R&R

It is estimated that the cost of delaying a decision on the way forward is around £70m per year in additional options development and reactive maintenance costs, and an extra £250m-£350m due to inflation on construction costs across the whole of the programme for each year of delay.