Robert Jenrick smiles as he is confronted over £1bn property approval for Tory donor Richard Desmond

Robert Jenrick confronted over flat approval for Tory donor Richard DesmondSource: BBC

Transcript

00:00Number one, now our viewers and you will no doubt recognise Richard Desmond, he's a wealthy

00:05businessman and Tory donor. Now when you were Housing Secretary in government, you have

00:10accepted that you approved a billion pound development of his unlawfully. Matthew, our

00:16viewer, wants to know why did you rush through his reversal of the planning decision regarding

00:21Richard Desmond's project to save him tens of millions of pounds? So you accepted you

00:26made a mistake doing it, but why did you do it? Well immediately after the 2019 general

00:31election where we had been elected on a manifesto commitment, which was absolutely the right

00:36one to increase the number of new homes being built in this country, we decided to approve

00:41the big schemes that came before us and we approved the five largest planning applications

00:46that we had. This was one of them, a big scheme on brownfield land and inner east London,

00:50exactly the sort of place that you should be building homes. The developer in question,

00:56he asked me about it, I told him not to talk about it. I regret obviously that I was subject

01:03to the mischaracterisation as to what our motivation was, which was simply to get homes

01:08built. And I would just point out that a couple of weeks ago, earlier in the summer, the Labour

01:13controlled Tower Hamlets council have approved exactly the same scheme as the one that I

01:18approved back in the day. But you admitted that you made the decision in the wrong way

01:22and there were, and you've referred to it there, suspicions that you made that decision

01:25because you sat next to him at a dinner and he was giving money to the party. I suppose

01:30the question that Matthew's asking is how can people trust you to make future decisions

01:34properly when you made that one in the wrong way? Well there was no impropriety, the issue

01:38was that I allowed a mischaracterisation to grow up by the fact that he sat next to me

01:44at this dinner. I told him not to talk about it at the time.