House of Commons (Rebuilding)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 25 January 1945.

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Photo of Mr Frederick Pethick-Lawrence Mr Frederick Pethick-Lawrence , Edinburgh East 12:00, 25 January 1945

I beg your pardon, the House of Lords somewhere out in the Victoria Gardens, and that we should continue to sit here and use the site of the old House of Commons Chamber, for offices and amenities of various kinds, I should have thought it must be evident to everyone that the House of Commons Chamber should be situated on the site of the burned-out Chamber. Then if there are to he amenities, whether they be for the personal convenience or the business convenience of hon. Members, they would naturally be elsewhere—either in the existing Palace of Westminster or, if that is inadequate, in some annexe beyond.

Among the proposals for those amenities, hon. Members have suggested that every Member of Parliament should have a separate room. That is a very large proposal which, quite obviously, could not find its place within the existing Palace of Westminster. There would have to be an annexe if that were the suggestion. Still more is that the case if the proposals of the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. C. Davies) were to find favour, which, if I understood him aright, were that in addition to providing rooms for business matters within the Houses of Parliament, a dormitory of some kind—I suppose some hostel or hotel—should be attached to the House of Commons where every provincial Member should be able to have, presumably, bed and breakfast. Whether that be desirable or not, it is not for me to say. What I do say is this, that surely it is open to this House to come to a decision with regard to the Chamber in which to conduct its business, independently of those maybe important but, certainly for this purpose, extraneous suggestions.

I should point out to hon. Members, however, that within the terms of our remit we have gone some way to do what hon. Members want. In the first place, to advance the amenities of the House generally, we have proposed that above the Chamber there shall be rooms for the clerks of the House, thereby creating for the effective carrying on of the day-to-day business of the House more room than was available in the old building and, I imagine, also setting free some of the accommodation which the clerks occupied—though on that I would not be quite sure—in the old premises. Underneath, in the sub-basement of the Chamber, we have proposed that there shall be rooms for hon. Members to meet their secretaries to an extent that did not exist before. Some fun has been poked at those rooms as "cubicles" which will be too small for practical purposes, but that is a matter which no doubt the House can consider in detail. That we have, within the limits of our remit, gone as far as we could to provide the business amenities, cannot possibly be disputed, I think. If hon. Members want more amenities, they must go to the Palace of Westminster (Accommodation) Committee to see whether they can be found within the existing building and, if that is inadequate, they must go beyond this building and seek to have an annexe built where these additional facilities can be provided.

I would like to say a word with regard to the remarks that have fallen from my hon. Friends the Members for Dumbarton Burghs (Mr. Kirkwood), for Leigh (Mr. Tinker), and for West Fife (Mr. Gallacher). We all agree that the provision of working-class houses, and houses generally, for the citizens of this country is of paramount importance, but I do not think it is possible to maintain that that is the only building which will have to go on after the war. The population does not want houses only; it will want work, it will want all kinds of things done in order to get full employment. Therefore, some of the building labour will have to be devoted to factories and other works which will enable full employment and a balanced trade and enterprise and manufacture of this country to be carried on. Do the hon. Members who object to our proposals really suggest that this Mother of Parliaments has to wait until all these requirements have been satisfied—five, ten or perhaps 15 years—before it can be accommodated adequately?