The Council Lost the Vote. So Did You.

Here is the scope of it. Any scheme of more than 150 homes, any tower over 30 metres — roughly ten storeys — or any 15,000 square metres of office and retail space can now be lifted clean out of a council's hands and decided instead by a mayor. Not consulted on. Decided by. The housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, calls this an "essential part of the toolkit" mayors need to deliver homes and regeneration. Thirteen mayoral areas — Manchester, Liverpool, the West Midlands, the West of England among them — are about to get powers Sadiq Khan has held in London since 2008.

Andy Burnham, who will be one of the first to use them, has at least had the decency to say the quiet bit out loud. He told the Sunday Times he understands the argument that this disempowers councillors, MPs and the residents who write to them. "It's not all about nimbyism," he said. "Sometimes it's the other way round — a local authority putting forward something that's unacceptable in terms of the impact on the community." Which is true, and also not the question anyone asked him. The question was never whether councils are sometimes wrong. It's who gets to overrule them, and what a resident is supposed to do about it afterwards.

Because the powers don't stop at call-in. Mayors will also be able to issue Mayoral Development Orders — planning permission granted upfront, with no application for anyone to object to in the first place — and raise a Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy modelled on the one that helped fund the Elizabeth line. That's a real financing tool with a genuine precedent behind it. It is also, alongside call-in, a fairly comprehensive removal of the local planning committee from the process of deciding what gets built where.

The case for all this is not hard to make, and Burnham's government is making it well. Nearly 180,000 children are in temporary accommodation in England. Local planning committees have spent three decades saying no to things — extra storeys, extra density, extra anything visible from a conservatory — for reasons that rarely survive contact with a spreadsheet: parking, "character," the precedent it might set. Somebody has to be able to say yes over their heads, and a mayor elected across a city region has a mandate a ward councillor with 1,400 votes does not.

Here's the arithmetic problem with that mandate, though. Greater Manchester has getting on for three million people in it. When its mayor calls in a fifteen-storey scheme for a specific street in Sale, the residents of that street are one three-millionth of the electorate that will eventually judge him, in an election fought on bin collections, buses, and whatever else has happened by polling day. The councillor they could once corner at a surgery, or vote out specifically for that decision, has been replaced by a figure they cannot meaningfully hold to account for anything as granular as their own back garden. That is not the same disease as a quango nobody elects at all — Burnham answers to a ballot, which is more than the Planning Inspectorate or Natural England ever have to. But it is a much coarser democracy than the one it replaces, and coarser is not the same as more accountable, whatever the toolkit language implies.

Sir James Cleverly, for the Conservatives, called it stripping councils of their powers while making it easier to build traveller sites against local wishes, and then pivoted to a promise to scrap stamp duty, which does nothing whatsoever about supply and everything about a headline. The Liberal Democrats' Gideon Amos said taking powers from communities is taking powers from local people, which is true and also roughly what Nimby councillors say about every proposed extension since 1974. Neither objection engages with the actual failure mode here, which isn't that decisions get made — it's that the person making them gets harder to find.

None of which means the councils were the heroes of this story. Most planning refusals in England are settled not by principled local democracy but by viability assessments, appeals to inspectors nobody elected, and years of delay that function as a de facto veto for whoever can afford the longest fight. Call-in powers don't create that unaccountability. They just relocate the argument to an office forty miles from the site, run by someone with a mandate too large to feel any single decision in it.

The honest version of this reform, the one nobody in Whitehall will write in a press release, is that Britain has decided the fastest way to get homes built is to thin out how much any one voter's objection can weigh — and that this is probably a fair trade for the 180,000 children currently sleeping in temporary accommodation, provided everyone stops pretending it's devolution. It is centralisation with better postage. The resident in Sale objecting to that tower is still, eventually, allowed to vote. She is just voting for someone she will share with two point eight million other people, most of whom have never heard of her street.