I know that the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) will need to get in, so I will try not to say as much as I had intended to.
I suggest that those who read this Third Reading debate, particularly those in another place who may be considering the Bill after the election, look at early-day motion 711, which spells out a number of the issues. I hope they will look with kindness on what has been said by my right hon. Friend the Minister, although there are other interpretations in respect of a number of issues.
Those who think there should be a memorial do not necessarily think the learning centre should be with it, while those who think there should be a learning centre do not think it should be squashed into what I described as a box under a memorial. There are many who think that the memorial could be better than the design that was not chosen in Ottawa, and I think it is a continuing embarrassment to the Government that the name of the person who was mentioned 13 times in the announcement of the winning design, Sir David Adjaye, is one that Ministers cannot say today.
I refer Members to the transcript of the Select Committee hearing on 5 February. Let me quote from paragraph 25:
“Many people will know Sir David Adjaye’s statement that ‘disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking’, but fewer people have heard the first part of that quote which is, ‘We have the opportunity to activate the entire site’”,
or what he had said previously:
“‘There has been a kind of picture painted that this is a public garden...It moves from being just a kind of public park to being much more ceremonial, much more kind of ordered’.”
I could also quote from paragraphs 26 and 27, but I will not do so. However, I will quote from paragraph 58, which states that if the learning centre is built,
“the playground is actually going to be reduced by 370 square metres. That is by 31%, not about 15% as noticed and remarked on by the inspector, or 10% in the figures given by Baroness Scott”
—the Minister in the House of Lords—
“in her 2023 parliamentary answer, or even zero reduction, as stated by David Adjaye, misleadingly”
—I would say “mistakenly”—
“to the inquiry. A 31% loss cannot possibly be said to be an enhancement or a reconfiguration of the playground. That is what Chris Pincher, then briefly Minister of State, said in support of his 2021 planning permission approval for this project.”
I refer Members to a book by Dorian Gerhold, “Victoria Tower Gardens”, which is subtitled “The prehistory, creation and planned destruction of a London park”. What we are talking about here is not particularly the memorial—having a good memorial would be better than having a bad memorial—but Victoria Tower Gardens. We have this legislation because the Government did not care about the 1900 Act.
I say to the Government that better faith would have been acknowledging that the Bill they were putting forward was hybrid, without resisting that fact to the examiners in both Houses. We now pass the Bill on the
House of Lords, where I believe that people will look again, with fresh eyes and fair eyes, at how we can commemorate those who died but do the best we can to educate people so that what happened is less likely to happen again.
The idea that a particular memorial will stop it happening would be laughed at by those who are commemorating and mourning the Yazidi genocide 10 years ago, the Rwandan genocide, and one or two others I could name in other parts of the world. We have to do what is right.
Let me end by saying this. My first cousin once removed was one of the Westminster Medical School students who went into Bergen-Belsen and were able to saves the lives of about half the people who were existing there at the time. I have worked with people Holocaust survivors, and I believe that we do best by doing what is right in a good way, which is why I welcome what the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) said about the normal planning process. As my right hon. Friend the Minister said and as Christopher Katkowski has said, the normal planning process will happen.
Let us look forward—if the Bill is carried over—to a planning process in which an application is made to the local authority, and the local authority makes the decision. If the authority approves the application, there is no problem; if it does not, the Minister can call it in, but the Minister should not call it in before Westminster City Council has had a chance to see any revised proposals that the Government can now put forward.
7.48 pm