In this week’s Nimby Watch, we’re going on a road trip – no need to pack a bag though, we’re only travelling from East London to Essex…
Alright then, where are we this week? We’re in Tower Hamlets, on the prospective site of a major central London redevelopment – covering 20,000 square metres, or about five acres, of zone one property.
Five acres in zone one? And to think people said Britain had lost its ambition. What’s the plan – I’m guessing mixed use, a nice mix of offices, retail, restaurants, some housing, and the obligatory big green public spaces with dubious architect sketches of sunny skies, right? Not quite. This is the Royal Mint Court, which was bought for £225 million all the way back in 2018, and which is the proposed site of the new Chinese embassy. Fairly reasonably, given its proposed size, it’s being called a ‘mega-embassy’, and it’s incredibly contentious.
Well, if you’re trying to build a five-acre site in zone one with no affordable housing, I’m not surprised. For once, I don’t think that’s the main objection here. The UK’s relationship with China is a complex one: we suspect them of stealing our intellectual property and worry about their geopolitical intentions. But at the same time, our government relies on the trade relationship to keep the economy afloat. So the question of whether to allow this vast trophy site is a fraught question of international diplomacy, with surprisingly high stakes.
Wow. But… this is a column about planning and Nimbys. Geopolitics and diplomatic policy isn’t really our lane. You’re quite right. It’s just that increasingly… planning encompasses everything now. China’s attempts to actually build this embassy have been going on for seven years, having initially been blocked by Tower Hamlets council. When Labour got elected last year, national government was going to reassess the decision – but they’ve now got cold feet and delayed their ruling on the matter, too.
Is there much local objection? There are objections from locals and from people across the country alike, and there’s some quite serious anger. There was a protest on the streets of London during August that was bigger than any single one of the asylum hotel protests that dominated the headlines. It’s just the objections centre around whether China will use the site’s location by the City to spy on or even disrupt financial trading; whether a potential adversary should get such a big site; whether we should have friendly diplomatic relations with China given its horrifying human rights record, and more.
These all sound incredibly serious. But does it seem weird that they’re being raised in the context of planning? It should! But to borrow a phrase, planning law has become the giant toad sitting atop British politics. If there’s something you don’t want to happen, the best tool in the box to reach for seems to be planning. The question of where and whether China gets an embassy feels like it should be decided by the Foreign Office and the House of Commons – not a local planning officer, national planning reviews, and an inevitable judicial review or legal challenge.
Well – China is trying to build something, and planning governs building. Does that really make the case that planning is being overextended? I’m so glad you asked that question.
You made me ask it. We’re the same person. Good point. The Bell Hotel case – in which a High Court judge ordered an Essex hotel to stop housing asylum seekers, only for his ruling to be overturned by the Court of Appeal – was also a planning row too. And crucially, in this case, no one had applied to build or even remodel anything.
That seems odd. It does. The Bell Hotel had been operating on-and-off as an asylum hotel since Covid lockdowns, and the local council had been grudgingly going along with that. After local protests heated up, the council suddenly lodged a 1,000+ page legal challenge under planning rules – claiming that while the physical building hadn’t changed at all, housing asylum seekers in a hotel was a change of use versus operating as a hotel to members of the public.
I thought that whole row was a human rights challenge – about residents versus asylum seekers? Not at all: the case at dispute (which is being heard in October) is entirely around whether the Bell Hotel needed to apply for permission. Given significant public anger at the hotel, the council reached for the best tool it had, and that was planning.
So… the planning system is now getting dragged into the most controversial issues affecting our society at the moment. Are you suggesting that might not be a good thing? That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. These are big debates of public policy and should be had on their own terms. Planning should be a streamlined process that explicitly favours trying to say ‘yes’ to building things – especially housing, given our chronic shortage and the problems that’s causing.
Instead, it’s become such a powerful way to block or stall projects, it’s getting dragged into all sorts of other disputes. That’s a sign of how overbearing it is. Planning shouldn’t be as powerful as it is.
I’m not sure that’s a rallying call for the ages, though. What would you even put on the merch? ‘Make Planning Boring Again’? You know what, let’s go with that.
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