Anyone in their right mind would want to move out. Among other problems, the property has leaking roofs, hidden pockets of asbestos, clear fire risks, vulnerability to flooding, and mice. The annual repair bill runs to around £50m. It is also routinely overheated, chintzily furnished and home to an aroma that often suggests last week’s school dinners. Small wonder that, since 2012, some of the Palace of Westminster’s occupants have been loudly fretting about the place’s upkeep.

On Thursday, a parliamentary committee published a long-awaited report on its future, and everything became that bit clearer. The parliamentarians concerned have recommended that both the Commons and Lords should leave their current home between 2022 and 2028, while parliament’s physical fabric is fixed, at a projected cost of up to £3.9bn. Downing Street has let it be known that – fancy that! – Theresa May has yet to take a view. MPs and peers will have to approve the plan, and they could conceivably opt instead for a decades-long process, whereby they stay put and work goes on around them. But in all likelihood, the first plan will be approved.

On the face of it, this might have been seen as an opportunity: to finally vacate a Commons chamber that does not have room for 219 MPs; have a close look at parliament’s absurd voting procedures; think about the wildly unequal provision of office space; and do something drastic. Reading a submission from the SNP – who now have some claim to being the UK’s only modern political party – you get a sense of what that might mean. It says that the Commons and Lords’ current home is an “expensive, impractical and archaic building” and points to the possibility of a “new-build parliament”. It also says that now is “the ideal opportunity to carry out a full-scale review of practices and procedures, including the possibility of replacing the House of Lords with an elected second chamber and introducing electronic voting”.

‘Britain being Britain, the palace’s icky, 19th-century approximation of what we would now call ‘heritage’ has long blurred into the 11th-century origins of Westminster Hall and convinced people of the specious idea that the whole place represents something sacred.’ Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images

But no: Britain being Britain, the palace’s icky, 19th-century approximation of what we would now call “heritage” has long blurred into the 11th-century origins of Westminster Hall and convinced people of the specious idea that the whole place represents something sacred. So the official proposals are depressingly conservative: the unrestorable will somehow be restored, while MPs spend six years round the corner, in the building currently used by the Department of Health (with, possibly, a new construction to house the Commons chamber). Peers, meanwhile, are envisaged doing their thing at the nearby Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. Then, come 2028, everyone will move back.

In terms of fulfilling its basic purpose, – which, let’s not forget, is a matter of democracy as well as functionality – the Palace of Westminster is a joke. For as long as our politics is played out there, it will surely remain locked into the arcane rituals – the lobbies, gowns and wigs, the awful hoopla around the opening of parliament – that have long since curdled into utter stupidity, but are somehow frozen into the place’s fixtures and fittings. Compared to many of the homes of legislative assemblies around the world, its architectural symbolism is awful: decision-making encased in neogothic walls and fake heritage, thus sustaining the idea that both governing and holding the powerful to account are a matter of almost mystical rites. They’re not: they’re the most basic requirements of any modern society, and it’s time their location reflected it.

I know: sketching this out in a political culture as cautious as ours threatens to take one close to La-La land

And then there is the bigger picture. “There are superficial attractions to parliament sitting outside London,” says the report, before dismissing them – but the argument for complete relocation runs much deeper than that. If the big ruptures of the last five years – Scotland’s estrangement from England, the vote for Brexit – have been partly due to a rising resentment about London’s domination of just about everything, there is an obvious case for moving at least some of our key institutions out of the capital. And imagine the benefits: a drastic drop in parliamentarians’ living expenses, a clear signal that the political class had at last learned something, the prospect of a physical distancing between big economic interests and the peers and MPs to whom they are often far too close.

It would be a monumental project, but it would answer fundamental issues. Parliament wholly separated from government would obviously be a non-starter – so over time, you would aim at the relocation of just about all of the main institutions of politics and the state: Downing Street, government departments, the HQs of the main political parties. In a fit of blue-skies thinking, the sociologist Danny Dorling has proposed orienting such a project around HS2, and reducing the latter’s cost by putting in the funds from the selling of all that government real estate. Time was, we could have probably got some money for all this from the EU, though if Brexit has the effect of re-focusing our attention on the English-speaking world, it might have the fringe benefit of reminding us of the work that goes on away from much bigger cities, in Canberra, Ottawa and Wellington.

I know, I know: sketching all this out in a political culture as cautious as ours threatens to take one dangerously close to La-La land. But we could start with a modest but significant proposal. Four years ago, the Labour peer Andrew Adonis suggested that the House Of Lords should find a new home, well away from the capital. “Half of our national politicians would then assemble well away from ‘Planet London’,” he wrote. “And yes, yours truly – a Londoner and proud of it – would be happy to lead the way, if by then I am still a member.”

Many of us might think of the upper house as all of parliament’s failings incarnate – but at the same time, for as long as it is around, moving it to another city would at least couch what it does in some sense of modernity. Doing so in tandem with its transformation into an elected chamber, needless to say, would be a huge step forward. But where to put it? Manchester is the English city closest to my heart, and would be perfect. But in a spirit of generosity and geographical good sense, I’d favour Birmingham, a splendid place in need of an uplift to restore its claim to being the country’s second city. The Tories, I see, will this month be once again pitching up there for their conference, with return visits planned for 2018 and 2020. If the city meets even their lofty requirements, why not?