Britain’s Parliament building is an architectural masterpiece, a UNESCO World Heritage Site visited by 1 million people a year. It’s also a crumbling, leaky, asbestos-riddled building at “real and rising” risk of destruction, lawmakers said Wednesday.
In a hair-raising report, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said the seat of British democracy is “leaking, dropping masonry and at constant risk of fire,” as well as pocked with asbestos.
“There is a real and rising risk that a catastrophic event will destroy” the building before long-delayed restoration work is done, the committee said.
In the most urgent in a series of warnings stretching back years, the committee said renewal work had been painfully slow and mostly amounted to “patching up” the 19th-century building, at a cost of about 2 million pounds ($2.5 million) a week.
The committee slammed “years of procrastination” over the future of the parliamentary complex, known as the Palace of Westminster. In 2018, after years of dithering, lawmakers voted to move out by the mid-2020s to allow several years of major repairs. The decision has been questioned ever since by lawmakers who don’t want to leave; last year, the body set up to oversee the Parliament project was scrapped.
