The Call-In Power Nobody Campaigned On

Somewhere in the paperwork for the 13 mayors of England there is now a line that did not exist a fortnight ago: the power to overrule a local council and wave through a development of more than 150 homes, or 15,000 square metres of shops and offices, or anything over 30 metres tall. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook calls this an "essential part of the toolkit" for delivering homes. Nobody has yet said which electorate handed mayors this particular tool, on this particular date, for this particular purpose. The consultation on how it will actually work is due next week, after the powers have already been announced, which tells you rather a lot about the order in which this government does its thinking.

The case for it is not stupid, and it deserves stating properly before it gets buried. Nearly 180,000 children are in temporary accommodation in England. The government has promised 1.5 million homes by 2029 and housebuilders are already telling anyone who'll listen that it won't happen. Sadiq Khan has held call-in powers in London for years, and Pennycook points to schemes his office has "unblocked" as evidence the model works, a claim worth noting even as London's own housebuilding numbers have fallen. Andy Burnham, newly arrived in Downing Street after nearly a decade running Greater Manchester, wants the same tool handed to his successors and to mayors from Liverpool to Tees Valley, and his argument is not unreasonable: local planning committees can behave like small standing armies against anything larger than a bungalow, and somebody with a wider view of housing need, a city-region's need rather than a single ward's, ought to be able to say so out loud and mean it. If the choice is between a council blocking 400 flats to protect eleven parking spaces and a mayor building them, most people who have ever actually tried to buy a flat will take the mayor.

But watch what has happened to the sentence "somebody ought to be able to say so." It has become "the mayor can now say so," as though those were the same claim. Burnham was elected on transport, on policing, on being the man who stood at a podium during the floods. Nobody in Greater Manchester cast a vote last May on whether a 200-home scheme in Trafford should proceed against the wishes of Trafford's own planning committee. The mandate exists in general — it is real, and large, and the Fabian Society is right that mayors carry some of the biggest personal mandates in British politics — but it was never itemised for this. A council planning committee, whatever its faults, answers to people who live on the street in question and can be voted off in May. A mayoral call-in answers to nobody until the scheme is built, the road is jammed, and the next mayoral election is three years away and fought on something else entirely.

The Institute for Government has already called the accountability arrangements around metro mayors "underpowered." IPPR North put it more precisely still: the system is "complex and broad, but yet also manages to be insufficient," a sentence that could serve as the epitaph for most of English devolution since 2016. Neither is describing an absence of scrutiny machinery. Combined authorities have overview committees, portfolio holders, annual reports, the works. What is missing is a clear answer to the only question that matters, which is what happens to the mayor personally when the call-in goes wrong: the tower nobody wanted, built on the mayor's signature, with the mayor three years from facing anyone about it.

There is a precedent for solving housing crises by lifting decisions above local council objection, and it is worth being honest about it. The 1946 New Towns Act created development corporations, appointed rather than elected, answerable to a minister who in turn answered to Parliament every sitting day, and used them to override existing local authorities in Stevenage, Harlow, Crawley, wherever the need was. It worked, and it worked because the line of accountability, while short-circuiting the council, ran straight and visibly to a named minister who could be questioned at the despatch box and sacked if it went badly. What is being built now runs somewhere stranger: through an elected figure with a real mandate, exercised on a matter their election never mentioned, checked by scrutiny committees whose reports nobody reads and by an electorate who will judge the whole four-year record, planning included, in one undifferentiated verdict at the ballot box. Call it neither decentralisation nor centralisation. It is the redistribution of the same fog to a smaller map.

None of which means councils are blameless, or that nimbyism deserves the reverence it still gets from people who own their houses and pulled the ladder up on schedule.

There was a cleaner way to do this. Put mayoral call-in on a ballot the way London's mayoral powers went in 1998, with a referendum attached to the office itself. Instead we have a press release, a threshold in square metres, and a consultation document that will land next week to describe machinery already switched on. Pennycook calls it essential. He may well be right. He has simply not been asked to say, by anyone who could remove him for being wrong, who exactly agreed.