‘Unacceptable cloak of secrecy’ around Houses of Parliament restoration, says MP

Published

2 years ago

January 7, 2023

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The chair of the Public Accounts Committee has told Sky News she “could weep for the five years” lost by the decision to abolish the organisation set up to managed the long-term renovation of parliament.

Dame Meg Hillier MP says there is an “unacceptable cloak of secrecy” around the restoration programme which she says was effectively sent back to the drawing board after the estimated bill rose to between £7 and £22 billion.

But every week the work isn’t done costs £2.5m maintenance – and former leader of the house Dame Andrea Leadsom says she’s worried the Palace of Westminster could be Britain’s Notre Dame.

After decades of debate, MPs are still intensely divided about the cost of the work, whether they have to move out of parliament, and where their temporary home might be if so.

When the Palace of Westminster burnt to the ground in 1834 the flames were so high they could be seen from 20 miles away.

Politicians of the day had spent many years beforehand arguing about the need to renovate the old parliament.

Now, nearly 200 years later, many fear that without large-scale restoration work a similar disaster could befall its successor.

But after decades of debate, the organisation set up by parliament in 2018 to manage the huge renovation project has been scrapped.

“I could weep for the five years we’ve lost,” says Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Public Accounts Committee. “There was a real issue here about shooting the messenger.

“It feels very much like we are back to square one. Now we have no sponsor body, no plans to carry out the work, and there’s still argument about whether we should stay in the building while the work is done or not.

“This is not about us as MPs. This is about a building that belongs to the country – yes, it will cost a lot of money, but you can’t dodge it.”

A recent report from the committee concluded any likely start date “has been pushed back by many years because of repeated attempts to revisit the basis of the programme”.

“We do not want it to take another catastrophic incident to finally galvanise action,” it reads.

What work is actually taking place?

Ongoing repair work to strengthen the roof and Victorian masonry is constantly under way and work has recently been carried out to restore the ceiling of St Stephen’s Hall, for example (on the site of the original Commons Chamber, which burnt down), as well as the renovation of the Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben.

But the real challenge is in the vast, labyrinthine basement with gas and dripping water pipes jumbled together alongside a morass of electric wiring, telephone cables, and even a working steam engine which is part of the Victorian sewage system.

Dr Alexandra Meakin, a politics lecturer at the University of Leeds, is an expert on the restoration programme. She says the mess in the basement is a disaster waiting to happen.

“With gas and steam pipes running alongside each other, even a tiny leak, there is a huge fire risk – it’s only allowed to stay open at all if there are fire wardens patrolling 24 hours a day.

“The risk is real, it’s not just cosmetic work. And it’s not just about the MPs and peers, but about the staff who work there – the thousands of people in catering and cleaning who shouldn’t have to work in a death trap, not to mention all the millions of visitors, including school children.”

The palace is also riddled with asbestos – last year it emerged a leak during building work meant up to 117 contractors and staff had potentially been exposed.

“If you try to do major work in the palace, it’s going to be difficult to work around it,” says Dr Meakin. “Asbestos runs the whole length of the building.”

Concerns over costs, timescales and governance

In January 2018, parliament voted to move forward with plans to vacate the building – known as a ‘decant’ – and carry out a full renovation, setting up an independent sponsor body (a team of some 55 staff and experts as well as parliamentarians) to lead and manage the project along the lines of the London Olympics.

Last January they published provisional cost and schedule estimates which predicted that the essential works alone would cost between £7bn and £13bn – and take 19 to 28 years.

If MPs and peers insisted on staying put, they warned the project could end up lasting as long as 76 years, and cost as much as £22bn.

For some, this was just too much to accept.

In March, the Commissions of the House of Commons and Lords (made up of the speakers, clerks and other senior parliamentarians) said they had concerns over the project’s costs, timescales and governance.

They recommended scrapping the sponsor body altogether and bringing the vast project in house.

MPs and Lords voted that through in the summer, and the decision passed into law just before Christmas.

Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh is sceptical of what he describes as the “ridiculous” estimates drawn up by the sponsor body.

“There are ways of doing it that mean you don’t have to move everybody out at vast expense,” he claims.

“We can’t have a very expensive gold-plated plan, especially when the economy is in tatters – the public would look askance at parliament spending £20bn on itself.”

‘We just need to get on with it’

Last month the Shadow Leader of the House, Thangam Debbonaire MP, accused some MPs of “undermining” the work of the sponsor body and “wrangling with the experts”.

Sir Edward denies this is the case, and says it’s right for MPs and Lords to take back control of the project.

“We just need to get on with it and make it safe,” he says.

Dame Meg Hillier by contrast describes the commission’s intervention as “grubby”.

“If they did this to any other piece of legislation, there would be uproar,” she says. “I’m incredibly concerned.

“We’ve seen huge problems in the past – costs nearly tripled during the renovation of the Elizabeth Tower, and the memory of what happened with Portcullis House [which ended up substantially over budget and schedule when built to house MPs’ offices in the 1990s] still haunts people here.”

Where would staff move to?

Another complication is the lack of consensus on where the occupants of the Palace of Westminster would move to, even if agreement is reached on the need for them to do so.

While long-established plans had been developed to decant the Lords to the nearby Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, then-prime minister Boris Johnson later asked the programme to explore the option of sending them to York instead.

In May 2022 Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove also intervened, saying he would rather see them moving to Stoke.

As for MPs, under a previous phase of the project, £70m was spent preparing plans to rebuild Richmond House, the old Department of Health building in Westminster.

But that idea has now been dropped as being too expensive; and while some hope that the remote working technology used during COVID-19 could help provide a solution, reaching consensus on this aspect of the programme alone is clearly fraught with disagreement.

‘One of the most famous buildings in the world’

As former leader of the house, Dame Andrea Leadsom MP shepherded the 2018 legislation through parliament.

She says the decision to undo much of it “seems a means to kick the situation into the long grass – it’s disastrous.

“I get that it’s a huge bill, and I’m sympathetic to the need to get value for taxpayers’ money – but this is one of the most famous buildings in the world.

“There have been something like 50 fire incidents in the recent decade, any one of them could have resulted in a kind of Notre Dame style absolute burning down of the palace.

“There’s a huge amount of money being spent already just to patch and mend… we just need to crack on and do it rather than circling back round all the time and changing the decisions about how we’re going to do it.”

When will the next vote take place?

MPs are now expected to vote on a new strategy by the end of next year.

In a statement, parliament said: “In July 2022 members of both Houses agreed a more integrated approach to future restoration, prioritising safety critical work. We are getting on with work across the parliamentary estate to ensure the safety of those who work and visit here, and to support the continued business of parliament.

“This includes planning for the large and complex restoration of the Palace of Westminster to preserve it for future generations.

“More than 2,000 areas of the palace have been investigated this year to give a better understanding of the building’s condition. These surveys will inform a wide set of options for delivery of the restoration work, including the level of ambition during these challenging economic times.”

World

Israeli soldier describes arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza

Published

12 mins ago

July 7, 2025

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Israeli soldier describes arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza

An Israeli reservist who served three tours of duty in Gaza has told Sky News in a rare on-camera interview that his unit was often ordered to shoot anyone entering areas soldiers defined as no-go zones, regardless of whether they posed a threat, a practice he says left civilians dead where they fell.

“We have a territory that we are in, and the commands are: everyone that comes inside needs to die,” he said. “If they’re inside, they’re dangerous you need to kill them. No matter who it is,” he said.

Speaking anonymously, the soldier said troops killed civilians arbitrarily. He described the rules of engagement as unclear, with orders to open fire shifting constantly depending on the commander.

The soldier is a reservist in the Israel Defence Force’s 252nd Division. He was posted twice to the Netzarim corridor; a narrow strip of land cut through central Gaza early in the war, running from the sea to the Israeli border. It was designed to split the territory and allow Israeli forces to have greater control from inside the Strip.

He said that when his unit was stationed on the edge of a civilian area, soldiers slept in a house belonging to displaced Palestinians and marked an invisible boundary around it that defined a no-go zone for Gazans.

“In one of the houses that we had been in, we had the big territory. This was the closest to the citizens’ neighbourhood, with people inside. And there’s an imaginary line that they tell us all the Gazan people know it, and that they know they are not allowed to pass it,” he said. “But how can they know?”

People who crossed into this area were most often shot, he said.

“It was like pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle,” he said.

The soldier described a prevailing belief among troops that all Gazans were terrorists, even when they were clearly unarmed civilians. This perception, he said, was not challenged and was often endorsed by commanders.

“They don’t really talk to you about civilians that may come to your place. Like I was in the Netzarim road, and they say if someone comes here, it means that he knows he shouldn’t be there, and if he still comes, it means he’s a terrorist,” he said.

“This is what they tell you. But I don’t really think it’s true. It’s just poor people, civilians that don’t really have too many choices.”

He said the rules of engagement shifted constantly, leaving civilians at the mercy of commanders’ discretion.

“They might be shot, they might be captured,” he said. “It really depends on the day, the mood of the commander.”

He recalled an occasion of a man crossing the boundary and being shot. When another man came later to the body, he too was shot.

Later the soldiers decided to capture people who approached the body. Hours after that, the order changed again, shoot everyone on sight who crosses the “imaginary line”.

At another time, his unit was positioned near the Shujaiya area of Gaza City. He described Palestinians scavenging scrap metal and solar panels from a building inside the so-called no-go zone.

“For sure, no terrorists there,” he said. “Every commander can choose for himself what he does. So it’s kind of like the Wild West. So, some commanders can really decide to do war crimes and bad things and don’t face the consequences of that.”

The soldier said many of his comrades believed there were no innocents in Gaza, citing the Hamas-led 7 October attack that killed around 1,200 people and saw 250 taken hostage. Dozens of hostages have since been freed or rescued by Israeli forces, while about 50 remain in captivity, including roughly 30 Israel believes are dead.

He recalled soldiers openly discussing the killings.

“They’d say: ‘Yeah, but these people didn’t do anything to prevent October 7, and they probably had fun when this was happening to us. So they deserve to die’.”

He added: “People don’t feel mercy for them.”

“I think a lot of them really felt like they were doing something good,” he said. “I think the core of it, that in their mind, these people aren’t innocent.”

In Israel, it is rare for soldiers to publicly criticise the IDF, which is seen as a unifying institution and a rite of passage for Jewish Israelis. Military service shapes identity and social standing, and those who speak out risk being ostracised.

The soldier said he did not want to be identified because he feared being branded a traitor or shunned by his community.

Still, he felt compelled to speak out.

“I kind of feel like I took part in something bad, and I need to counter it with something good that I do, by speaking out, because I am very troubled about what I took and still am taking part of, as a soldier and citizen in this country,” he said

“I think the war is… a very bad thing that is happening to us, and to the Palestinians, and I think it needs to be over,” he said.

He added: “I think in Israeli community, it’s very hard to criticise itself and its army. A lot of people don’t understand what they are agreeing to. They think the war needs to happen, and we need to bring the hostages back, but they don’t understand the consequences.

“I think a lot of people, if they knew exactly what’s happening, it wouldn’t go down very well for them, and they wouldn’t agree with it. I hope that by speaking of it, it can change how things are being done.”

We put the allegations of arbitrary killings in the Netzarim corridor to the Israeli military.

In a statement, the IDF said it “operates in strict accordance with its rules of engagement and international law, taking feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm”.

“The IDF operates against military targets and objectives, and does not target civilians or civilian objects,” the statement continued.

The Israeli military added that “reports and complaints regarding the violation of international law by the IDF are transferred to the relevant authorities responsible for examining exceptional incidents that occurred during the war”.

On the specific allegations raised by the soldier interviewed, the IDF said it could not address them directly because “the necessary details were not provided to address the case mentioned in the query. Should additional information be received, it will be thoroughly examined.”

The statement also mentioned the steps the military says it takes to minimise civilian casualties, including issuing evacuation warnings and advising people to temporarily leave areas of intense fighting.

“The areas designated for evacuation in the Gaza Strip are updated as needed. The IDF continuously informs the civilian population of any changes,” it said.

World

Australian mother guilty of murdering three people with poisonous mushrooms

Published

2 hours ago

July 7, 2025

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Australian mother guilty of murdering three people with poisonous mushrooms

An Australian mother has been found guilty of murdering her estranged husband’s parents and an aunt by serving them a beef wellington laced with poisonous mushrooms.

Erin Patterson, 50, invited her former parents-in-law, Don and Gail Patterson, both 70, and Gail Patterson’s sister, Heather Wilkinson, 66, to the fatal lunch on 29 July 2023.

The mother-of-two, from the state of Victoria in southern Australia, has also been convicted of the attempted murder of Mrs Wilkinson’s husband Reverend Ian Wilkinson.

All four fell ill after eating a meal of beef wellington, mashed potatoes and green beans at Patterson’s home in the town of Leongatha, the court was told.

Prosecutors said Patterson knowingly laced the beef pastry dish with deadly death cap mushrooms, also known as Amanita phalloides, at her home.

The guests ate their meals off four large grey dinner plates, while Patterson ate from a smaller, tan-coloured plate, the court heard.

Mrs Wilkinson and Mrs Patterson died on Friday 4 August 2023, while Mr Patterson died a day later.

Reverend Wilkinson spent seven weeks in hospital but survived.

Her estranged husband Simon Patterson, with whom she has two children, was also invited to the lunch and initially accepted but later declined, the trial heard.

The jury was told that prosecutors had dropped three charges that Patterson had attempted to murder her husband, who she has been separated from since 2015.

Reverend Wilkinson said that immediately after the meal, Patterson fabricated a cancer diagnosis, suggesting the lunch was put together so that she could ask them the best way to tell her children about the illness.

The prosecution said she did this to justify the children’s absence.

The defence did not dispute that Patterson lied about having cancer.

The trial attracted intense interest in Australia – with podcasters, journalists and documentary-makers descending on the town of Morwell, around two hours east of Melbourne, where the court hearings took place.

A sentencing date is yet to be scheduled.

What makes death cap mushrooms so lethal?

The death cap is one of the most toxic mushrooms on the planet and is involved in the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.

The species contains three main groups of toxins: amatoxins, phallotoxins, and virotoxins.

From these, amatoxins are primarily responsible for the toxic effects in humans.

The alpha-amanitin amatoxin has been found to cause protein deficit and ultimately cell death, although other mechanisms are thought to be involved.

The liver is the main organ that fails due to the poison, but other organs are also affected, most notably the kidneys.

The effects usually begin after a short latent period and can include gastrointestinal disorders followed by jaundice, seizures, coma, and eventually, death.

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World

Israel attacks Houthi targets at three ports and power plant in Yemen

Published

6 hours ago

July 7, 2025

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Israel attacks Houthi targets at three ports and power plant in Yemen

Israel says its military has attacked Houthi targets at three ports and a power plant in Yemen.

Defence minister Israel Katz confirmed the strikes, saying they were carried out due to repeated attacks by the Iranian-backed rebel group on Israel.

Mr Katz said the Israeli military attacked the Galaxy Leader ship which he claimed was hijacked by the Houthis and was being used for “terrorist activities in the Red Sea”.

It came after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued an evacuation warning for people at Hodeidah, Ras Issa, and Salif ports – as well as the Ras al Khatib power station, which it said is controlled by Houthi rebels.

The IDF said it would carry out airstrikes on those areas due to “military activities being carried out there”.

Afterwards, Mr Katz confirmed the strikes at the ports and power plant.

Earlier in the day, a ship was reportedly set on fire after being attacked in the Red Sea.

A private security company said the assault, off the southwest coast of Yemen, resembled that of the Houthi militant group.

It was the first such incident reported in the vital shipping corridor since mid-April.

The vessel, identified as the Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier Magic Seas, had taken on water after being hit by sea drones, maritime security sources said. The crew later abandoned the ship.

The Houthi rebels have been launching missile and drone attacks against commercial and military ships in the region in what the group’s leadership called an effort to end Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

Between November 2023 and January 2025, the Houthis targeted more than 100 merchant vessels with missiles and drones, sinking two of them and killing four sailors.

The Houthis paused attacks in a self-imposed ceasefire until the US launched an assault against the rebels in mid-March.

That ended weeks later and the Houthis have not attacked a vessel, though they have continued occasional missile attacks targeting Israel.

A renewed Houthi campaign against shipping could again draw in US and Western forces to the area.

The ship attack comes at a sensitive moment in the Middle East.

A possible ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war hangs in the balance and Iran is weighing up whether to restart negotiations over its nuclear programme.

It follows American airstrikes last month, which targeted its most-sensitive atomic sites amid an Israeli war against the Islamic Republic that ended after 12 days.

How did the Houthis come to control much of Yemen?

A civil war erupted in Yemen in late 2014 when the Houthis seized Sanaa.

Worried by the growing influence of Shia Iran along its border, Saudi Arabia led a Western-backed coalition in March 2015, which intervened in support of the Saudi-backed government.

The Houthis established control over much of the north and other large population centres, while the internationally recognised government based itself in the port city of Aden.