Xi Jinping may have met his match in Britain’s planning system

Xi Jinping might be one of the most powerful men on earth, but the Chinese president is about to face the ultimate battle of wills when he is pitted against Britain’s infamous planning appeals system.

A man who is used to entire cities being built at the click of his fingers will soon discover just how mind-numbingly slowly we do things in this country.

President Xi’s plan for a new “super-embassy” in the heart of London has been approved by the Government, but it could be delayed for years after neighbours raised enough money to challenge it in the High Court, arguing that planning laws have been broken.

The campaigners say they are prepared to take their fight all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, which raises the prospect of the embassy being delayed by the legal process until after the 2029 general election. The Conservatives, Reform and the Liberal Democrats all say they would rescind planning permission if they get into power.

The Royal Mint Court Residents’ Association crowd-funded more than £145,000 to challenge the Communities Secretary’s decision to grant planning permission for the embassy, which has been criticised by the White House and opposition MPs on security grounds.

The heads of MI5 and GCHQ have also voiced concerns about the wisdom of allowing the Chinese to build what critics have described as a spy hub in the heart of London.

The decision to allow the embassy, described as an “act of cowardice” by the Conservatives, has cleared the path for Sir Keir Starmer to visit Beijing next week with a delegation of business leaders.

As The Telegraph revealed earlier this month, the plans for the embassy include a secret room in the basement less than two metres from fibre-optic cables carrying sensitive information from the City of London.

Opponents of the planned embassy have six weeks to begin a formal challenge, and the residents say they expect to be ready well within that timeframe.

Mark Nygate, the treasurer of the residents’ association, said: “Tuesday was an extraordinary day because the Government announced its decision to allow the embassy and within a matter of hours we had raised the money for a judicial review of the decision.

“We have a couple of barristers working on it for us, and we intend to put papers into the High Court by the end of February making a formal application for the review.”

Mr Nygate is one of dozens of people who live in privately leased flats behind the proposed site of the embassy, on land that is now owned by the Chinese.

He and others fear that building work will be hugely disruptive, as the former Royal Mint building that is due to be converted into an embassy is just metres from their front doors. They are worried that they might even have to move out of their homes if the Chinese decide to build a high-security perimeter around their building to replace a wooden fence that currently marks the boundary.

The legal grounds for an appeal, however, are likely to centre on their belief that Boris Johnson wrongly agreed to give consent for the former Mint to be designated as diplomatic premises when he was foreign secretary in 2018. The Chinese bought the site opposite the Tower of London for £225m and at 20,000 sq m it would be the biggest embassy of its kind in Europe.

The campaigners have received a legal opinion from Lord Banner, one of the country’s leading planning law experts, who said that the decision to grant permission for the embassy might have been unlawfully “predetermined” by ministers as a result of Mr Johnson’s assurance, rather than decided on its merits.

Planning permission for the embassy was granted by Steve Reed, the Communities Secretary, this week after a decision by the local Tower Hamlets council to refuse planning permission was called in by Mr Reed’s predecessor, Angela Rayner.

MPs and Lords from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China have written to the planning casework unit of the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government to argue that Mr Johnson’s 2018 letter tainted the planning process.

Their letter says: “No fair-minded observer could conclude that the UK Government could retain an open mind to refuse a planning application for a site they have already formally designated as an inviolable foreign mission.”

A second problem with the embassy site revolves around the fact that the ruins of the 14th-century St Mary Graces Abbey stand within it. The Chinese have said that they will open a free museum where the public will be able to see some of the remains, but that the museum will remain on land which is diplomatically inviolable, meaning it is treated as sovereign Chinese territory, in common with other embassies.

MPs are concerned that this would mean Chinese dissidents, such as Hong Kong activists who have had bounties imposed on them, could be snatched and detained if they visited the site, and would be “beyond reach” of the police and UK law.

Mr Nygate said the money raised so far would cover the cost of a judicial review in the High Court which, if successful, would stop the embassy in its tracks. If the residents’ association lost, it would try to raise more money to take the case to the Court of Appeal and, if necessary, the Supreme Court.

Given that other planning disputes have taken up to five years once a judicial review has been launched, that would make it likely that the embassy would be on hold until after the next general election.

Sir Keir will become the first British prime minister since Theresa May in 2018 to visit Beijing when he lands in China towards the end of next week. He is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart, Li Qiang, and will also travel to Shanghai, though the trip could be postponed if the situation over Greenland escalates or other events take precedence.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]