Narrator>> The Palace of Westminster is home to one of the busiest parliamentary institutions
in the world. Thousands of people work here and visit every day and millions of tourists
are drawn to its iconic splendour. Completed in the mid 1800's, many of the Palace's
features have never undergone major renovation. So what being done to tackle any problems,
not only to ensure the Palace continues to function as a working building, but also to
preserve its unique heritage for future generations? In this video we will look at the mechanical
and electrical systems of the Palace. These provide essential services, such as heating,
water, ventilation and power. Essentially the arteries of the building, they are critical
to the continuous operation of Parliament. Shafts and tunnels originally designed for
ventilation, have become the routes for hundreds of miles of cabling for telephones and computer
systems, as well as steam heating pipes and conditioned air. These routes are now extremely
congested, making it difficult to access, maintain or repair the services. Of all the
elements of the building, it's the mechanical and electrical services that have the shortest
and the most predictable life span and their obsolescence can only be dealt with effectively
by replacement. Some of the pipe work in these tunnels is between 60 and 100 years old. Way
beyond their predicted life span. There's a high risk of breakdown, making the current
approach of replacing systems only at highest risk of failure unsustainable and more costly.
In 2012 alone, almost 3,000 electrical faults needed repairing. There are 98 M&E rises and
128 plant rooms. Andrew Peck>> This was deemed to be a very high
risk plant room that would fail imminently, so we stripped out all of the plant, we're
now removing all of the asbestos and indeed the paint as well. There is asbestos within
the Palace of Westminster, you'd expect that of a building of this age, especially
since there was a reconstruction after the Second World War and there was a lot of asbestos
as insulation material around the building services. It is well managed, we have an excellent
management plan, assisted by the use of consultants, we have specialist contractors in that tent
up an area, they put it under negative pressure and they remove the asbestos from the floors,
from the voids, from the ceiling, from all around the services. There are two layers
to this room, the two layers have taken three months, so it's quite a substantial cost
and impact to the programme of the works, but it's the right thing to do. The plant
room originally had four air handling units that went cross ways, very, very tight, very,
very congested as are many of the other plant rooms within the Palace, they've now been
removed and we will be replacing with two far more efficient, in fact 80% more efficient
than the original. One of the key constraints is that we must have no impact to the building
users or indeed any of the visitors, so we've developed this temporary plant room to enable
us to actually strip out the plant room that we've just seen. It's very, very costly,
very, very time consuming, but during the process we've had minimal impact on the
users of the building. We've got 128 plant rooms within the Palace of Westminster, 80%
of those are in the basement and the remaining 20 are at ground level and in the roof voids.
We have a strategic phase programme of refurbishment works to the plant rooms and infrastructure
within the Palace, but this by no means takes away the problem. All it is, is an interim
phase to reduce the risk of failure. Now some of this pipe work is 110 years old and it's
still functioning. The main heat source is steam and the steam boilers are right at the
end of that corridor. Because the infrastructure is so old, that has given us tremendous problems
with leakage. When the heating system starts usually in September, we do get an awful lot
of leaks and an awful lot of man power is used to solve those leaks. We're in plant
room B, part of the work package is to remove these specialist cables from the plant room.
The plant room has steam on aged infrastructure pipe work, should the pipe work fracture then
it would take out all these specialist systems. Specialist systems include low voltage power,
building management system, fire detection system, communications and data. We've undertaken
significant surveys around all of the Palace of Westminster and we've worked out what
needs to be done. We've prioritised that list and we're currently going through a
phase programme of replacement of infrastructure where we can, bearing in mind the building
is fully occupied. Narrator>> Recently a pipe burst in the floor
above the committee corridor and discharged 30,000 litres of water in 15 minutes. It found
its way down through the building structure and flooded the corridor below. It took three
weeks to repair and at the same time essential live services running through the corridor
floor had to be managed. Repairing the ageing mechanical and electrical systems couldn't
be put off any longer because the risk of system failure is so high, but this medium
term programme of work is just a fraction of what needs to be done. Only 15% of the
highest risk building service plant rooms are being replaced to buy time, while a longer
term approach is identified. To find out more, please watch the other videos
in this series.