Westminster warned of Notre Dame-style blaze as repair tab spirals

MPs have been warned the Palace of Westminster could go up like Notre Dame unless they finally settle how to pay for its restoration. The cross-party Commons public accounts committee says inaction is piling risk onto a Grade I-listed building that already needs 24-hour fire patrols. Every year Parliament dithers adds an estimated £420m to the restoration bill.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, blamed a political allergy to making decisions. He asked MPs to picture global rolling news footage of Notre Dame-like flames licking out of the roof, with heritage destroyed or people hurt. Those aren't notional possibilities, he said, but real and rising risks.

The Victorian estate is held together by constant patching: failing plumbing, leaking roofs, crumbling stone behind a maze of scaffolding, and electrics so old they demand round-the-clock fire watches. Keeping it standing costs roughly £1.5m a week, a figure the committee expects to hit £2m a week without action. Estimates for the full job run as high as £40bn and could stretch across six decades.

The committee says it isn't its job to pick a programme, but it wants the process fixed. It calls the current governance far too complex, and wants the Commons and Lords clerks to lay out an engagement plan within six months, sharper cost estimates, a timetable pointing to a decision on the main project in 2030, and a new restoration and renewal select committee to hold officials to account.

Two options remain from an original four. A full decant would move staff to the north side of the estate, put the Commons in Richmond House and the Lords in the QEII conference centre, at about £15.6bn over up to 24 years. A staged decant, costing about £39.2bn and running 38 to 61 years, would park the Commons in the Lords chamber for up to two years. The committee flags worries that temporary accommodation is dictating the programme rather than the other way round, and calls the £417m QEII refurbishment and roughly £2bn northern estate setup very high, noting Canada built a temporary chamber for far less.

A Parliament spokesperson said the report provides welcome scrutiny. Without action, they said, the palace faces at best a process of managed decline, while insisting safety work is already under way across the estate.