portal:actionURL Spring MVC Portlet

Question

I am trying to create a actionUrl using the following code

<portlet:actionURL var="actionUrl"><portlet:param name='action' value='viewModules' /></portlet:actionURL>

and map that onto a spring controller

However the controller does not respond as the generated url's ampersands are encoded

e.g.

<snip>&amp;p_p_lifecycle=1&amp;p_p_state=normal&amp;p_p_mode=view&amp;p_p_col_id=column-1&amp;p_p_col_count=2</snip>

If I unencode and paste into the browser this works

I have added portlet.url.escape.xml=false to portal-ext.properties but to no available

Could any please point me in the right direction

Many Thanks