Holyrood rings up an extra £50,000 bill for mobile coverage

Published on Sunday 8 April 2007 00:19

IT COST £400m and was hailed as a futuristic site to base a modern democracy, but it seems it cannot cope with the demands of modern communication.

Scotland's gleaming new Parliament building is having 50,000 worth of signal boosters so that MSPs and their staff can chat on their mobiles.

The move comes in response to complaints from MSPs, party workers and staff at the Holyrood complex that they could not get a decent reception.

One user at the new Parliament said: "Despite this being the age of the mobile phone and instant communication, we can't get a signal. This building is basically a huge concrete box which doesn't let anything through."

A Scottish Parliament spokeswoman said: "The Parliament has recently let a contract with transmission service provider Arqiva to enhance mobile telephone reception in the Holyrood building using a small network of antennas called pico-cells.

"These are about the size of smoke detectors and will be placed in areas of the building where it is felt there is benefit in enhancing mobile coverage."

She added that the cost of the contract over a 10-year period is estimated to be 50,000.

The hugely complicated building saw its costs balloon from an initial estimate of about 40m to a final bill of 400m. More than 14,000 changes to the design were made while building work was under way.

Last year, one of the beams in the Holyrood roof came lose and dangled over the heads of MSPs. In addition, the infamous "think bubbles" on the sides of the MSPs' offices, with their distinctive shaped windows, have been prone to leaking.

Nevertheless, the Scottish Parliament has managed to impress many people in the worlds of art and architecture.

In 2005, the building scooped the coveted 20,000 Stirling Prize for architecture, proof that it has real artistic quality, according to supporters of the building. Earlier this year, the final bill for the edifice was announced as being 414.4m, 16.1m less than the budget of 430.5m set in 2004.

Holyrood's Presiding Officer, George Reid, said of the debacle: "I've no doubt the escalating costs cast a dark shadow over devolution. The plain fact is that Holyrood should never have been built as it was. It has been damaging to Scotland's self-confidence in our ability to run our own affairs."

Amid growing anger over the costs and delays, former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser was appointed to chair an inquiry in 2003.

He was critical of the civil servants running the project, the main consultants working on it and the MSPs overseeing it.