Localism Was the Word. The Power Stayed in London.

Greg Clark stood up in the Commons on 17 January 2011 and called it the biggest transfer of power to local communities in a generation. The Localism Bill, he said, would sweep away the regional quangos and hand planning back to the people who lived with the consequences of it. Councils got a "general power of competence" — the right, in the Act's own strange, almost philosophical phrasing, to "do anything that individuals generally may do." Neighbourhood forums could draw up their own plans, put them to a referendum, and see them written into law. It read, if you squinted, like the most sincere devolution project since Attlee's councils built the postwar estates.

Fifteen years on, the government is giving mayors the power to overrule the councils that Act was supposed to empower.

That is not a contradiction so much as a confession. Read the Localism Act closely and the tell was always there, buried in Part 5 alongside the neighbourhood plans: the London Development Agency abolished, its housing and funding powers folded not into boroughs but into the Greater London Authority, and a new power created for the Mayor to establish Mayoral Development Corporations. The Act that promised to move power down to communities was, in the same clauses, moving it sideways to a regional executive with a single elected head. Localism and mayoralism arrived in the same bill, wearing the same rhetoric, and it was never quite clear which one Whitehall actually believed in.

The neighbourhood-planning provisions were real, and they are worth being fair to. A parish council or a neighbourhood forum could designate an area, draft a plan, take it through an independent inspection, and put it to local people in a referendum; if it passed, it became part of the statutory development plan, binding on the local authority. This is not nothing. In villages and suburbs across England it produced plans that genuinely shaped where housing went, precisely because it gave residents something more binding than a consultation response: a vote that counted. The people who now sneer at localism as pure theatre should have to explain the mechanism away, and mostly don't try.

But a right to be consulted on where the houses go is not the same as a right to decide whether they get built at all, and it was never going to survive contact with a housing crisis the government could no longer pretend not to notice. Neighbourhood plans could shape and steer. They could not, on their own, produce the volume of housing that thirty years of undersupply required. When volume became the political emergency, the architecture built to protect local preference became the thing standing in the way of the target.

Jules Pipe saw this within two years. As Mayor of Hackney in 2013 he said the Act "does not challenge the deep-rooted centralisation in the UK," which from a Labour mayor of a borough that had actually used the powers was not a partisan jab but a field report. The financial constraints were the real story underneath the constitutional one. A council can be handed the general power of competence and still be unable to do very much with it if the Treasury controls the revenue support grant, the borrowing caps and the business-rate retention formula. Localism Act, meet the spending review. The spending review wins every time, because the spending review was never devolved to anyone.

Greater Manchester's experience is the cleanest illustration going. In November 2011 the Combined Authority used the Act to push for a further transfer of powers over transport and housing, real devolution on their own terms. It took three years and an Act of Parliament of its own before that transfer materialised in November 2014. The lesson was not that devolution is impossible. It is that devolution requires central government to keep choosing it, repeatedly, against its own institutional instincts, and a government that has to keep re-deciding to give away power will eventually stop.

Which brings us to the mayors, and to the strongest case for taking power back off councils — the one the Act's own architects would recognise. Councils genuinely have struggled to build. Planning committees defer to local objection with a reliability that would embarrass a weather forecaster; the average council has neither the planning officers nor the political appetite to push through the housing numbers the country needs; and a mayor with a strategic, city-region mandate can plausibly claim a democratic legitimacy that a single ward's nimby majority cannot. If the argument is that somebody has to be able to say yes when fifty councils say no, that argument has merit, and it is roughly the argument Whitehall made for the London Mayor in 2011 too.

The trouble is that this is centralisation admitting localism was never going to be permitted to produce an answer it didn't like. The Localism Act gave communities a voice on the theory that voice would produce consent, and consent would produce housing. When it produced neither in anything like the volume required, the state's response was not to fix the incentives that made councils cautious — the funding formula, the political cost of building, the absence of land-value capture — but to insert a mayor above the council who can be leaned on more directly by the one department that was never devolved: the Treasury.

Here is the honest genealogy. In 1947 the postwar planning act nationalised development rights entirely, and Whitehall decided directly. In 2011 it pretended to give that decision to the parish and the neighbourhood forum. In 2026 it is giving it to the regional mayor, who answers to a bigger electorate but still, in the end, to the same spending review. Each version has looked more local than the last. None of them has moved the actual lever — money, land value, the power to say yes and make it stick — outside the M25. The word localism did the devolving. The power stayed in London, and merely changed desks.