British lawmakers on Wednesday issued a "real and rising risk" that a catastrophic event will destroy the 147-year-old palace of Westminster, which houses the UK's parliament.
A report by UK's House of Commons Public Accounts Committee said that the seat of British democracy is "leaking, dropping masonry and at constant risk of fire", and pocked with asbestos in up to 2,500 locations.
The committee slammed "years of procrastination" over the future of the parliamentary complex and said that the renewal work had been extremely slow and mostly amounted to "patching up" the building, at a cost of about 2 million pounds ($2.5 million) a week.
It demanded politicians and parliamentary authorities set out "a clear indication of the cost and timeline for getting this massive job done before it becomes too late to do so." The Committee says that, to date, the focus has been on MPs rather than the thousands of staff and visitors who use the building.
In 2018, after years of dithering, the MPs voted to move out by the mid-2020s to allow several years of major repairs. The complex suffers major architectural damages like the roof leaks, century-old steam pipes burst, and chunks of masonry occasionally come crashing down. Mechanical and electrical systems were last renovated in the 1940s.
Officials said they are "planning for the large and complex restoration of the Palace of Westminster to preserve it for future generations," and members of the House of Commons and House of Lords are expected to vote on the way forward later this year.
{{/usCountry}}Officials said they are "planning for the large and complex restoration of the Palace of Westminster to preserve it for future generations," and members of the House of Commons and House of Lords are expected to vote on the way forward later this year.
{{/usCountry}}The Clerks and newly created programme structures "need to build confidence in their ability to deliver a programme of this magnitude and complexity". Timely transparency and compliance with health and safety protocols, particularly around asbestos, urgently needs to improve before more significant works and potentially more serious incidents occur, the report added.
The palace of Westminster is an architectural masterpiece, a UNESCO World Heritage Site visited by 1 million people a year. It was designed by architect Charles Barry in a neo-Gothic style, after the fire destroyed the previous parliament complex in 1834.