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Ministers have delayed a decision on whether to grant planning permission to a proposed Chinese “super-embassy” in London amid concerns about redacted drawings in the building’s plans.
The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, was due to make a decision on 9 September but has pushed this back to 21 October, saying more time is needed to consider the plans for the development, which would occupy a sprawling 20,000 sq metres (5 acres) at Royal Mint Court in east London.
The plan has met fierce opposition from local people and campaigners concerned about Beijing’s human rights record in Hong Kong and the Xinjiang region. Several large protests have taken place outside the site in recent months.
Earlier this month, Rayner, who also serves as the housing secretary, gave the Chinese embassy two weeks to send additional details about its plans. In a letter, she noted that two of the proposed embassy buildings in the drawings – the Cultural Exchange Building and Embassy House – had been “greyed out”.
She wrote to the planning consultancy in charge of the Chinese embassy proposal, asking it to “identify precisely and comprehensively” the drawings that had been redacted and explain the rationale and justification for the redactions.
Earlier this week, the planning consultancy responded, saying it was “neither necessary nor appropriate” to provide full internal layout plans.
In correspondence published by Luke de Pulford, the executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, one of several parties that has objected to the embassy’s construction, the consultancy said: “The applicant considers the level of detail shown on the unredacted plans is sufficient to identify the main uses.”
De Pulford said: “These explanations are far from satisfactory. The government set very few conditions and the Chinese didn’t even meet those. Now, to visit the abbey ruins, dissidents who want to visit will be on Chinese land, vulnerable to capture, out of the reach of UK authorities.”
China bought the Royal Mint Court site for £255m in 2018, but its plans to build an embassy there stalled after Tower Hamlets council refused planning permission in 2022, citing security concerns and opposition from residents.
The Conservative government declined to intervene but Labour took the matter out of the council’s hands by calling it in soon after taking power last summer. The future of the embassy has become a major issue in diplomatic relations between the UK and China, with the country’s president, Xi Jinping, raising it with Keir Starmer in their first phone call last August.
The Guardian reported last year that China was blocking requests to rebuild the British embassy in Beijing while the fate of its own embassy in London was being decided.
