Ex-spending watchdog called in to probe £10 million Lords front door ‘scandal'
The Lord Speaker has now written to independent crossbencher Lord Morse, who led the National Audit Office for a decade, to look into the £9.6 million debacle.
Parliament has previously heard that a security officer had to be permanently stationed at the door to press a button to open it. One peer has calculated this was costing £2,500 per week.
It also emerged that the price tag for the work spiralled by nearly 60% from the original estimate of £6.1 million.
The fiasco has raised questions over lessons to be learned for the long-delayed restoration of the Palace of Westminster, which is forecast to cost billions of pounds.
In his letter to Lord Morse, Lord McFall of Alcluith, who chairs the House of Lords Commission that oversees the running of the site, said: 'The commission identified that it was unclear how many issues were due to manufacturing and installation failures and how many were due to issues with the initial identification of requirements and subsequent need for alterations.
'Additional information will be needed to understand the failures, including information on costs – both how the initial project figure of £6.1 million was arrived at and the increase to the current total of £9.6 million, and any unanticipated additional costs such as increased staffing to manage and operate the entrance.
'It will be important to assess the quality of the decision-making in establishing the project and the ways in which the evidence provided for the specifications of the new entrance were tested to ensure they took account of user requirements.'
He added: 'The problems that have arisen around delivery of the new entrance pose larger questions about effective programme delivery, including capability within parliamentary departments.'
Speaking at Westminster, senior deputy speaker Lord Gardiner of Kimble, who also sits on the commission, said: 'It is unacceptable that the Peers' Entrance does not operate as it should. The commission has directed urgent work to resolve this.'
He added: 'The cost to remedy defects will not be borne by the House and will be met by Parliament's contractors.'
Tory former minister Lord Robathan said: 'I do not hold the Senior Deputy Speaker responsible for this scandal, but it is a scandalous waste of public money.'
Demanding to know who was responsible 'by name', he said: 'It is now nearly £10 million for a door that does not work. Somebody accountable should be identified and should perhaps resign for this terrible waste of public money.'
Conservative peer Lord Hayward said: 'The Senior Deputy Speaker told us the total cost, but the staff manning that door, calculated on the written answer he provided to me, are costing £2,500 per week. That cost has to be borne by someone.'
Responding, Lord Gardiner said: 'On the issue of the number of people involved in the manual use of the door while it is being repaired and made usable, I am assured that they are within the existing complement of members of staff.'
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
3 hours ago
- NBC News
House passes major policy bill in win for Trump's agenda
With a narrow vote, the House passed the Trump tax and spending bill in a major win for the President. Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries set the record for longest House floor speech as he decried the bill today, but Republicans are celebrating their victory. President Trump says he will sign the bill tomorrow, the 4th of July. NBC News' Ryan Nobles reports.
The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
One ‘big, beautiful' flip-flop: Trump's budget turns the Freedom Caucus back into the Fealty Caucus
Hardline conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus looked more like members of the Fealty Caucus on Thursday after a rebellion among the party's spending hawks melted away in the final hours and the House passed the legislation known as the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill Act' on Thursday. President Donald Trump wins, while just about every wing of the GOP congressional caucuses suffered an embarrassment in some form or another (except maybe the leadership). The Freedom Caucus was the last faction to face down its foe and blink. The group's members circulated a three-page memo to members of the GOP caucus over Wednesday decrying the Senate-passed version of 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' as a betrayal of the framework Speaker Mike Johnson had agreed to. It was an all-encompassing retreat. Rep. Ralph Norman left the White House this week with a three-point plan he said GOP leaders could implement to get his vote to a 'yes'. He received none of those concessions — no one did, as the House passed the version of the bill sent back from the Senate. Amending the bill in any way would have sent it back to the Senate before it reached Trump's desk, endangering the July 4 deadline that members in both chambers blasted as arbitrary. 'I can't vote yes just because everybody says we got to get it done by July 4th,' Rep. Chip Roy said in an interview this week. He then did so, explaining in a Twitter post that he received 'assurances' from the White House that the administration was preventing Medicaid fraud. Another far-right Republican, Rep. Derrick Van Orden, grew irate this week when questioned whether the caucus was just following Trump's marching orders. 'The president of the United States didn't give us an assignment. We're not a bunch of little bitches around here, okay?' he barked at a reporter. He'd later go on to snipe at The Independent for a 'bulls***' question about a vote being held open for hours while Trump and the leadership brought the holdouts into line. They aren't the only ones who folded, to be clear. Sen. Lisa Murkowski was a potential 'no' vote in the Senate, who sharply criticized the legislation and fretted about the real world effects that new work requirements would have on SNAP and Medicaid recipients, in multiple comments to reporters after passage of the bill on Tuesday. Murkowski told reporters, after voting for the bill, that she hoped the House would amend the legislation and send it back to the Senate for more work, suggesting that Republicans blow past the president's deadline. But it was her very refusal to hold out for those changes that guaranteed they were kept out of the bill when Speaker Mike Johnson called everyone's bluff at once. Instead, Murkowski (and others) secured a $50bn fund aiming to prevent rural hospitals from closure, and some Alaska-specific carve outs that earned her the label 'cheap date' from one senior Democratic congressman. In the end, Republicans folded. They know they folded. And they are none too happy to have that fact pointed out. Roy spent the afternoon after the House vote retweeting his defenders, who insisted that the Freedom Caucus had not 'caved'. 'Constantly threatening to vote against bills and then voting for them makes Roy/Freedom Caucus folks highly mockable, but they have used this tactic to substantially push the bill to the right', read one backhanded compliment retweeted by the Texas congressman. Norman summed it up cleanly in his own statement: '...at the end of the day, I'm standing with the president.' Andy Harris, chair of the caucus, has failed to release a clear explanation for his own flip-flop by Thursday evening. He, too, was retweeting the group's X boosters but only after retweeting the caucus's statement bashing the bill. On his website, Harris's most recent statement about the legislation declared: 'We want to be crystal clear: if the Senate attempts to water down, strip out, or walk back the hard-fought spending reductions … achieved in this legislation, we will not accept it.' He told The Hill on Tuesday afternoon: 'The final package at the end of the night was very different from what we started with in the morning.' It was not clear how; no amendments were passed. Even the SALT caucus, in the end, voted for legislation that sees the cap on state and local tax deductions return to the current rate by the end of the decade, a blow to their efforts. Republicans will argue otherwise, but the president's insistence on the bill's timely passage and the very public failures of just about everyone involved to keep their word will make this bill a very difficult task for GOP members to campaign on, especially in primary season when the most politically engaged voters make up the electorate. The only real clear winners here are Johnson — who defied expectations again and cemented his speakership likely through Trump's presidency — and the president himself, who now gets to play with more money for his mass deportation scheme than he's ever had access to before.
Metro
4 hours ago
- Metro
What is Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' and what does it mean for Americans?
President Donald Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill' has cleared multiple hurdles and passed in Congress and is on its way to his desk to be signed into law. The House passed Trump's signature domestic policy bill 218-214 on Thursday, with Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Thomas Massie being the only Republicans who joined Democrats in opposing it. Trump set a July 4 deadline for the bill to reach his desk and his Republican allies delivered, with House Speaker Mike Johnson in particular succeeding in flipping dozens of members who hand planned to vote against it. The president is set to sign his bill at 5pm on Friday while celebrating the Fourth of July at the White House. Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act' is a massive spending and tax bill with his signature policies. It will extend his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was set to expire at the end of 2025. It will make many tax cuts permanent and boost funding for defense, border security and producing energy. To offset those costs the bill makes cuts to programs like Medicaid health insurance for low-income and disabled Americans, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) food aid. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the bill would add $3.4trillion to the federal deficit and leave nearly 12million Americans without health coverage over the next decade. But the Trump administration has contested that and claim that it would decrease the deficit by more than $5trillion. Immigrants including refugees, asylees and victims of sex trafficking and domestic violence may no longer qualify for federal benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. Additionally, immigrants would have to pay more for programs like work authorization and Temporary Protected Status. The bill puts aside $45billion to detain undocumented people taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It provides $46.5billion for border wall construction, making up the amount that Trump was not able to secure for the project during his first term. The passage of the 'Big, Beautiful Bill' represents Trump's first major legislative win in his second term, and he touted it as 'the biggest bill of its kind ever signed' in the US. Speaking to reporters at Joint Base Andrews late afternoon Thursday, Trump confirmed that he will be signing the bill surrounded by lawmakers including Johnson and that military aircraft will be flying over the White House as part of a July 4 celebration. 'It's going to be a great day,' he said. 'So we'll be signing with those beautiful planes flying right over our heads.' Elon Musk, who served as Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief, has been criticising the bill ever since his departure from the White House, and that caused a big feud to happen between the two billionaires. More Trending The Tesla CEO has denied Trump's claim that he is upset because the bill eliminates federal tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles, and said he is against it because it 'pork-filled' and will drive up the deficit. On Wednesday, Musk appeared to take a break from firing shots at Trump and gave him 'credit where credit is due' on his work to try to resolve conflicts and wars around the world. Hours after the bill cleared Congress, Musk remained silent on the bill on his X platform. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Convenience store worker dies after 'manager sat on and suffocated her' MORE: Hundreds of blueberry boxes recalled over 'severe' listeria warning in the US MORE: Fact check: Is the US using planes for deportations to throw people into the ocean?
