Stripping html + encoded html

My xml contains this:

<HTMLEncodedWebText>
&lt;SPAN lang=EN-GB&gt; &lt;P dir=ltr align=left&gt;This property is now available
</HTMLEncodedWebText>

I want to strip all the HTML, or just insert it as HTML. I have tried creating functions to strip (which work in an external test PHP script):

$stripped = html_entity_decode($thehtml);
$stripped = strip_tags($stripped);

… but the functions are not returning the stirpped code. Any pointers?
Thanks