Parliament should permanently relocate outside London rather than undertake a bloated Westminster restoration
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/simonjenkins. "Notre-Dame was restored in five years and under budget. But the Palace of Westminster? No chance | Simon Jenkins | The Guardian." November 6, 2026. www.theguardian.com
The Gist
Fixing the Houses of Parliament is now priced at up to £40bn and could take decades, which the author thinks is absurd given how cheaply other big jobs were done. He argues that instead of sinking money into the old building, Parliament should move permanently out of London, which would also help rebalance the country and shake up a stale institution.
Conclusion
Rather than pursue an absurdly expensive and open-ended restoration of the Palace of Westminster, the government should permanently relocate Parliament outside London, for example to Manchester, Liverpool or Birmingham, and turn Westminster into a museum.
Premises
- Estimated restoration costs have risen from £3.5bn–£5.7bn (2014) to up to £40bn, with timelines of 11 to 61 years.
- Other large works on the same building were far cheaper: the whole roof was replaced for £80m and Big Ben restored for £80m, so a figure 500 times higher for the basement is implausible.
- Notre-Dame was rebuilt in five years for well under €1bn, showing that a major restoration can be done quickly and cheaply, and large UK projects like HS2 tend to overrun, so the £40bn will likely grow further.
- MPs treat the figures as sacred and assume open access to the Treasury, and the decision on construction and delivery is deferred to 2030, leaving it to future politicians, so there is no effective cost discipline.
- Parliament is dysfunctional and unreformed: the Lords is unreformed, Commons procedure is immutable, and the adversarial chamber layout encourages staged confrontation, so leaving Westminster is an opportunity for institutional renewal.
- Overcentralisation in London is a curse of the British state, and countries such as the US, Canada and Australia do not suffer from locating their parliaments outside their biggest cities.
Assumptions
- The £40bn estimate is inflated rather than reflecting genuine technical complexity of a historic, occupied building.
- Comparisons with a roof replacement, Big Ben and Notre-Dame are valid benchmarks for the basement and services overhaul.
- Relocating Parliament would cost less than restoring Westminster, including the cost of a new or adapted building.
- Relocation would reduce overcentralisation and improve parliamentary culture, and a new layout would change behaviour.
- Westminster could be repurposed (e.g. as a museum) without significant additional costs or loss of national symbolism.
- Political and cultural attachment to Westminster is outweighed by the financial and reform benefits.