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Parliament Square

asked the Chairman of Committees whether he will make representations to the World Squares for All Steering Group on the proposal to close only the road on the south side of Parliament Square and not that on the east side. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the context of this dinner-hour debate has been changed by the announcement by the Mayor of London last week that he was calling in the plans for Parliament Square. Therefore, whereas I wished to argue that we should be thinking about closing two sides of Parliament Square rather than one, making the best of Parliament Square as a world square and as a world heritage site, I fear that we are now having to argue for closing off even one side of the square. I start by declaring an interest. I grew up partly on the other side of the square. I sang in the choir in the Abbey for four years and as a boy I used to watch the opening of Parliament every year from the roof of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel. So Old Place Yard is a very familiar place, and in those days there was very little traffic through it. It was a democratic open space, a place for ceremony before the London traffic overtook it. I had not, I have to say, realised that it was a world heritage site until I read the Department for Communities and Local Government consultation document some months ago on the management of world heritage sites. As noble Lords may know, Saltaire is also a world heritage site. I noticed that, in 1987, Westminster Abbey, St Margaret's Church, the Jewel Tower and the Palace of Westminster together were nominated as an inclusive whole as a world heritage site. I mark as an ““inclusive whole”” because, as the UNESCO advisory report put it: "““Westminster Abbey … is inseparable from the parliamentary history of the Kingdom””." It concluded that the site therefore needed to bring in the whole of the history of the development of parliamentary monarchy by bringing in the Abbey in which the Commons first met. The Commons indeed met in the Chapter House and then in the Refectory until, in 1547, after the dissolution of the monasteries, they were able to move across the road and occupy St Stephen’s Chapel. Old Palace Yard was the coronation route and the burial route for kings and queens. It is still, of course, the judges’ route, and as the Supreme Court, which started in Westminster Hall, moves to the other side of Parliament Square, the historical unity will be, in a sense, extended. The Palace was, after all, built alongside the Abbey by the Norman kings to legitimise their link with Edward the Confessor. The law courts started over here. So this is, as Tristram Hunt put it in the Guardian the other week, a great, "““public realm, crying out for a sophisticated and challenging constitutional narrative about the nature and multiple meaning of Britishness””." It is a great democratic space, a focus for citizenship, identity and memory. Some have even suggested that as Parliament Square is redeveloped it might be appropriate to move the Cenotaph, currently also a traffic island, into Parliament Square so it would become the place where national ceremonies take place, linking Parliament, the monarchy, Whitehall and the rest. The world squares proposal was to return the city as a whole to pedestrians from the dominance of cars and trucks. I am very sorry that the new Mayor of London appears to be cooling so much on this. We have to ask ourselves: who comes first, the motorist or the citizen? The criteria for discussing whether we close off one, two or no sides of the square has to revolve around three things: first, traffic; secondly, security; and then the whole nexus of heritage, ceremony, the state and the democratic citizenship, which we all claim to love. Traffic is of course the most difficult issue. When I wrote an article on this in the House magazine, the noble Lord, Lord Walker, replied on behalf of the Westminster residents’ action group, which, as he pointed out, brought together those living on the other side of the Palace of Westminster—Great Peter Street, Smith Square and the like. They had been much inconvenienced by the temporary closure of Old Palace Yard last summer. The traffic going down Great Smith Street and into Great Peter Street had been a tremendous problem and they wanted traffic to flow freely again. Transport for London has estimated that closing the south side would, "““significantly reduce traffic on the east side of the square””—" that is, the area between the Abbey and Parliament itself. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, it is said, intervened at an early stage of discussions about redesigning Parliament Square to insist that the Prime Minister should have ample space to drive at some speed into New Palace Yard. I recall that the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, asked how convenient it would be for mothers-in-law to get out of their cars outside St Margaret’s, when I asked a Question about this. One can deal with all these things and still design a system in which people will drive through the Palace of Westminster from New Palace Yard to Black Rod’s gate, and in which nevertheless we will restore this wonderful public space. Others will say, ““Yes, but where will Peers park their cars?””. I have checked that. I am told that Abingdon Road car park is half empty most of the time. We could provide some space for disabled Members inside the Palace itself. Others will say, as someone in the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said to me at lunchtime, ““After Trafalgar Square I do not want anything else like this. It has been a disaster for motorists””. But Trafalgar Square has also been a wonderful experience for tourists, citizens, cyclists and all those who love London. Over time, traffic would disperse along the Albert Embankment as far as Great Smith Street, and we ought to be trying to reduce traffic around London. In particular, I find the heavy trucks which pass through Old Palace Yard quite astounding, and they are also a potential security hazard. I want to flag security as my second issue. It is very clear that, from the security angle, closure of both sides of the square has tremendous advantages, not only in terms of the greater security of the Palace but also the possibility of removing those unsightly barriers which, unavoidably, are temporary because they have to be removed for ceremonies. So long as we have traffic flowing through, we are going to have great metal barriers there for 10 months of the year, being lifted up and down and going in and out all the time. It is not a way to set off the middle of a world heritage site. On reading the consultation document, I noted that all world heritage sites are now supposed to have site management plans looking at how to improve the area as a whole. That seems to have been left entirely outside the current argument. I end by focusing again on heritage, great occasions, democratic gatherings, Parliament in context and on this area as, in a sense, the heart of the nation, the heart of our democratic tradition and the heart of our development of Parliament and parliamentary monarchical democracy. That is the real issue at stake. Or is Conservative London and the Conservative City of London, which has opposed the proposals all the way through, to be a motorists’ London only?