Chery at Millbrook Tests UK Co-Location Policy, Not Espionage

Strategic competitors have been allowed to set up shop next to classified military test sites before. The story rarely turns on what the neighbour actually does. It turns on whether the host country has a public process for the adjacency in the first place.

The Chinese automaker Chery is opening an R&D headquarters at UTAC Millbrook in Bedfordshire, the 700-acre site where the Ministry of Defence puts the Boxer armoured transporter through its paces across 40 miles of specialised track. Chery has publicly denied any intent to surveil MoD testing and framed the move as a routine global R&D expansion. There is no public evidence it has done anything wrong.

Col Phil Ingram, the former British Army Intelligence Corps officer, has used the opening to surface a more durable question. His concern, as reported by the Telegraph, is that a UK classified proving ground is now sharing infrastructure with a Chinese high-tech carmaker, and the public record so far shows no Whitehall review explaining how that co-location was approved. The Defence Vehicle Dynamics exhibition next month will put Chery and MoD contractors on the same tarmac.

The repeatable pattern is this. Dual-use proving grounds are absorbing commercial neighbours from strategic competitors, and the co-location decision is not on the public record — no Whitehall review of the approval has been published. Who signs off, on what basis, and under what review will decide the next case too.