Sir Keir Starmer’s government has postponed a decision on whether to grant China permission for a new London “super embassy”.
The planning decision for the proposed site near the Tower of London was called so ministers would make the final decision and was expected on 21 October.
But the deadline for the housing and planning secretary, Steve Reed, to make the decision has been pushed back to 10 December, amid mounting pressure on the prime minister over his approach to China.
Controversy has surrounded China’s plans to build a large embassy near the Tower of London since 2018; no final decision has been made as it has been repeatedly delayed. China bought the 20,000sq m complex in the Royal Mint Court at the time for £255m.
China hawks in Westminster have raised alarm that the embassy site could be used to conduct surveillance from British soil.
And Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former top aide, said on Thursday he was told explicitly by MI5 and MI6 that “China is trying to build a spy centre underneath the embassy” and asked for help persuading the former prime minister to block it.
He told ITV’s Peston: “Everyone knows what's going on and it's a sign of some kind of appalling mix of incompetence and extreme cowardly weakness from Whitehall that they OK building literally a spy centre underneath our capital city.
“What kind of signal does that send to the rest of the world?”
Pro-democracy campaigners from Hong Kong, as well as Uyghurs and Tibetans, meanwhile, fear that intimidation and reprisals from the Chinese state could result from the embassy going ahead.
The delay follows a change at the top of the department responsible for the planning case, which saw Mr Reed take over from Angela Rayner after she was forced to quit.
Plans for the super-embassy were previously rejected by Tower Hamlets Council in 2022, with the Chinese opting not to appeal.
However, Beijing resubmitted the application a fortnight after Sir Keir Starmer’s election victory last year, believing a Labour government may be more receptive to the application.
Since entering office, Sir Keir’s government has sought closer links with Beijing after a cooling during the final years of Conservative Party rule.
The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) wrote to the minister on Monday saying that approving the embassy at its proposed site near the Tower of London was “not in the UK's long-term interest”.
Committee chair Matt Western MP wrote to Mr Reed saying that the proposed location presents “eavesdropping risks in peacetime and sabotage risks in a crisis” due to its proximity to fibre optic cables, data centres and telecoms exchanges serving Canary Wharf and the City.
He also noted reports of plans for basement rooms and tunnels and that the security services have warned that allowing Beijing to set up the biggest embassy in Europe would create a hub for the country to expand its “intelligence-gathering and intimidation operations”.
The looming decision on the embassy comes amid continued scrutiny of how the government and the Crown Prosecution Service handled the collapsed Chinese spying case. Critics have said the delay to the planning decision has been made due to the current focus on the case and China’s espionage in the UK.
Mr Western said the case was a recent reminder of the scale of China’s alleged illicit activities.
“We urge you to acknowledge that approving this decision is not in the UK’s long-term interest, and the consequences of having such a site will be very difficult to handle if relations with Beijing worsen in future,” he said.
“We therefore urge the government to keep long-term national security at the forefront of its decision-making, and this must be demonstrated in your response to the embassy planning application.
“The UK’s security and economic resilience will be negatively affected if the plans are allowed to proceed as currently proposed.”
Shadow housing secretary James Cleverly said the government has “actively sought to silence the warnings about threats to national security from the mega-embassy”.
Mr Cleverly said: “If Keir Starmer had any backbone, he would ensure his government threw out this sinister application – as Ireland and Australia did when faced with similar embassy development proposals from Russia.”
