Parliament should move to Manchester while the Palace of Westminster is refurbished, the Labour leadership frontrunner Andy Burnham has said.
“I hope it will be given the most serious consideration,” said Burnham, MP for Leigh in Greater Manchester, in an interview with the Manchester Evening News. “Everybody feels frustrated that decisions get made that aren’t fit for the whole country and I think the statement would be fantastic. It could be good for politics in this country,.”
Last week an independent report said restoration of the Houses of Parliament without moving MPs and peers out temporarily would cost £5.7bn and take 32 years.
If MPs and peers were moved out for six years, the cost would drop to £3.5bn, the report said, prompting suggestions that if parliament was to leave Westminster it might as well leave London.
But would Manchester be able to cope with an influx of 650 MPs and their staff? The proposal was greeted with limited enthusiasm by Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester council since 1996.
“Of course we could accommodate them, but looking at how they behave, would we want them?” he asked. “An alternative might be a five-year adjournment and see if the public notices.”
Not only might a move outside of the capital help to reverse the democratic deficit in a Londoncentric political system, but it would also dramatically cut MPs’ expenses.
To rent a nice one-bed flat in Manchester’s city centre costs £650-750 per month – half the price of its Westminster equivalent. A king prawn curry over lunch in the Cinnamon Club, a parliamentary favourite, costs £28 – but in Manchester, MPs could enjoy “rice and three”, a Mancunian curry classic, for a fiver or less.
Neither the House of Commons or Lords is constitutionally obliged to sit in their present Westminster locations. Following the fire of 1834, various debates and votes of the era took place elsewhere, including the repeal of the Corn Laws.
This year the Guardian’s own Simon Jenkins proposed a move to Manchester. Its status as second city had been cemented, he said, and with a good airport and train links to London, not to mention a cavernous town hall that is “almost a facsimile of Westminster”, it would be perfectly placed to house squatting MPs.
He argued:
There would be nothing like this to so acknowledge the revival of provincial England. Nothing would do more to correct the metropolitan centralism of modern government. A regional move would reassert parliament as a popular congress of a united kingdom. It would be a gathering of the commons, not a colloquium of elites. Removal from London would weaken parliament, but that in turn might encourage it to self assertion.
What Jenkins did not note was that Manchester’s neo-gothic town hall is itself in need of urgent repairs, having not had a full upgrade since its completion in 1877.
