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Robert Jenrick smiles as he is confronted over £1bn property approval for Tory donor Richard Desmond
The Independent
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10/13/2024
Robert Jenrick confronted over flat approval for Tory donor Richard DesmondSource: BBC
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00:00
Number one, now our viewers and you will no doubt recognise Richard Desmond, he's a wealthy
00:05
businessman and Tory donor. Now when you were Housing Secretary in government, you have
00:10
accepted that you approved a billion pound development of his unlawfully. Matthew, our
00:16
viewer, wants to know why did you rush through his reversal of the planning decision regarding
00:21
Richard Desmond's project to save him tens of millions of pounds? So you accepted you
00:26
made a mistake doing it, but why did you do it? Well immediately after the 2019 general
00:31
election where we had been elected on a manifesto commitment, which was absolutely the right
00:36
one to increase the number of new homes being built in this country, we decided to approve
00:41
the big schemes that came before us and we approved the five largest planning applications
00:46
that we had. This was one of them, a big scheme on brownfield land and inner east London,
00:50
exactly the sort of place that you should be building homes. The developer in question,
00:56
he asked me about it, I told him not to talk about it. I regret obviously that I was subject
01:03
to the mischaracterisation as to what our motivation was, which was simply to get homes
01:08
built. And I would just point out that a couple of weeks ago, earlier in the summer, the Labour
01:13
controlled Tower Hamlets council have approved exactly the same scheme as the one that I
01:18
approved back in the day. But you admitted that you made the decision in the wrong way
01:22
and there were, and you've referred to it there, suspicions that you made that decision
01:25
because you sat next to him at a dinner and he was giving money to the party. I suppose
01:30
the question that Matthew's asking is how can people trust you to make future decisions
01:34
properly when you made that one in the wrong way? Well there was no impropriety, the issue
01:38
was that I allowed a mischaracterisation to grow up by the fact that he sat next to me
01:44
at this dinner. I told him not to talk about it at the time.
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