Zahawi’s family lived in breach of planning condition for a decade
NADHIM Zahawi’s family lived in breach of a planning condition on their country mansion for a decade, planning documents show.
The embattled Conservative Party chairman and wife Lana saib bought the newbuild property on the edge of the Cotswolds in 2011.
But when the house was erected on the site of a riding school and former farm seven years earlier, it was built with a ‘ rural occupancy condition (ROC)’ which had been attached to the planning permission – meaning that only agricultural, forestry or equestrian workers could live there.
The Zahawis have now been granted immunity from enforcement action after exceeding a ten-year time limit on such breaches under planning legislation.
The revelations heap further pressure on Mr Zahawi after it emerged he negotiated a multimillion pound settlement with the taxman while he was chancellor last year, and therefore in charge of HMRC.
Mr Zahawi is fighting for his political life after he reportedly had to pay £4.8 million to the taxman for a ‘careless’ error, including a major penalty over his shareholdings in polling firm YouGov which he co-founded.
Questions surrounding his tax affairs were said to have cost him a knighthood in the recent New Year’s Honours list.
Last night, Clive Betts, chairman of the Commons levelling up, housing and communities committee said the Daily Mail’s revelations suggested Mr Zahawi ‘thinks he can do what he wants and, in this case, get away with it’. The 35-acre estate
in Warwickshire cost the Zahawis £875,000 and has served as the stratford-on-Avon MP’s constituency home.
It boasts a livery yard with a floodlit training area and tack room. stratford- on-Avon Disin trict Council, which has been run by the Tories since 2003, failed to take enforcement action against the Zawahis despite refusing a flurry of applications by the couple and their planning agents to amend or remove the clause. The authority’s seeming inertia meant that
December 2021 – ten years after the Zahawi family moved in to the house – the application for a Lawful Development Certificate to ratify the breach was permitted.
Planning experts told the Mail that the Zahawis’ L- shaped country home would have been devalued by the ROC when the Zahawis bought it, meaning they will now benefit financially from the condition being ‘nullified’.
Mr Betts, who represents sheffield south East for Labour, added: ‘There’s a very simple rule – Members of Parliament shouldn’t behave in a way in which ordinary members of the public shouldn’t behave.’ When the Mail visited the village, one resident said the breach and revelations
about the MP’s settlement with HMRC ‘doesn’t paint him (Mr Zahawi) in a good light’, adding: ‘There are a lot of moneyed people around here, and it’s the tax system that tends to bind them together.’
A council spokesman said the series of planning applications were ‘processed in the same way that they would have been had it been any other applicant’.
In 2013 Mr Zahawi apologised after making a ‘mistake’ in claiming almost £6,000 in expenses to heat the stables on his estate. It emerged he had used a company in the tax haven of Gibraltar to buy the home, but denied it was a means of reducing his tax burden. Mr Zahawi was approached for comment.
‘He thinks he can get away with it’