We conduct affairs of state in a building that’s riddled with asbestos and mice. Can’t Britain do any better? | Rupa Huq

. UK edition

The Palace of Westminster
The restoration of the Palace of Westminster could cost billions and take more than 60 years. Photograph: Vuk Valcic/Sopa Images/Shutterstock

Parliament is steeped in history, but too many parts of the estate are dangerous and squalid. The promised upgrade can’t come a minute too soon, says Labour MP Rupa Huq

Kemi Badenoch, mid-TV interview with Robert Peston at the House of Commons recently, was embarrassingly upstaged by a mouse. Just another day in a parliament building not fit for purpose.

Last week, a critical meeting between the prime minister and his more than 400 MPs plus assorted peers (who total another 800) happened in a room only big enough to accommodate 170. Consider that the Commons chamber itself seats only 430 of the total 650 MPs. That same day, exhibition boards went up around parliament explaining the “restoration and renewal” options for the Palace of Westminster. They are expected to be voted on as early as March.

Consider them and ponder whether this is how you want the nation’s most pressing affairs of state to be organised. One scenario has MPs relocating to different bits of parliament’s footprint while the works are executed, occupying the House of Lords during the redoing of the Commons chamber. There is precedent for this during the blitz when the House of Commons was bombed; many a Churchillian line such as “we will fight them on the beaches” was uttered from the red benches of the Lords rather than the Commons’ green benches.

Then there is the “full decant” option, in which both houses would move while the job is done. Neither option comes cheap. It would be an estimated £8.4-£11.5bn and take 19 to 24 years for the full decant, whereas staying put would come at a whopping £11.8-£18.7bn and take somewhere between 38 and a staggering 61 years.

The Palace of Westminster has been my workplace for 11 years. I love it dearly. But it desperately needs an urgent upgrade. ITV viewers may have been surprised by the sight of Badenoch and a mouse but we 650 honourable members were not. Nor were the few thousand parliamentary pass holders encompassing clerks, journalists and cleaners. Parliament is overrun with vermin – our furry friends can often be seen in parliament’s various dining rooms. We watch as they laugh at the bait boxes laid out for them.

The quantity of repairs needed to bring the place up to scratch is immense. Even the modern part of the parliamentary estate – the 1990s Portcullis House with its glass-topped atrium – has not weathered well. The lack of mobility-friendly features confirms that this is not a place suitable for disabled people – only 12% of the estate floor space has step-free access, which would never be allowed in a contemporary building.

Parliament is awe-inspiring (it’s not many people who get to work under Big Ben), but it’s visibly falling apart – 19 stonemasonry incidents have occurred since 2016. The magnificent gold leaf-finished ceiling of central lobby, which gave the world the verb “to lobby”, has visible gaps and reportedly sheds tiny invisible fragments of asbestos, a hazard to health. The cavernous, ancient Westminster Hall, dating to 1097, where the late Queen Elizabeth II lay in state, is resolutely immune to getting any internet or mobile phone reception; highly impractical if you are arranging to meet people there who are running late and messaging you to say so.

In my 11 years in the job, I have now seen many iterations of the proposals for improvements – including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s unpopular wheeze to move parliament to York.

After my third election (I’ve done four), I signed up for the MPs’ parliamentary basement tour and it was like travelling through time to some sort of illicit bat cave. Among the grisly sights were the rusting pipes (14 miles of Bakelite-looking tubing that caused 80 leaks in the archaic steam heating system in 2024-25), the ropey-looking electrics (roughly 250 miles of cabling past its prime) and ample evidence of the rodents that obviously keep busy when not fulfilling supporting roles on television.

We have a prime minister keen to expel political rats out of No 10, but he faces an even more difficult job driving rodents out of the Hogwarts-like parliamentary estate, and making it fit for a thriving, modern democracy.

Whether an upgrade happens because we have all moved into the Lords or because we have temporarily headed off somewhere else altogether, it must happen. If the state of parliament reflects the state of the nation, both need to see better days.