The Mayor Can Now Overrule the Council. Who Overrules the Mayor?

Somewhere in one of the thirteen mayoral combined authorities that will shortly acquire this power, a planning committee is about to spend an evening doing what planning committees do: reading objections about drainage, parking and the loss of a hedge, weighing them against a housing target nobody in the room set, and voting. Under the rules announced this week, that vote will be advisory. The mayor can call the application in and decide it anyway. The committee will still meet. It just won't matter.

The government's case, delivered by the housing minister Matthew Pennycook, is that this is "essential" — his word — to delivering new homes and regeneration, and it is worth taking seriously before it is taken apart. Nearly 180,000 children are living in temporary accommodation in England. The 1.5 million homes target that Labour set itself is, in Pennycook's own admission, "really stretching," and he is right that a smaller target would not be commensurate with a housing shortage this severe. Councils do sometimes say no to things a country that needs homes cannot afford to keep saying no to: a scheme for 400 units blocked over a heritage view corridor, a warehouse conversion killed by eleven letters about traffic. Andy Burnham, who spent nearly a decade as Manchester's mayor before becoming Prime Minister, puts the argument plainly. Challenge "cuts both ways," and sometimes it is the council putting forward something unacceptable to the community it claims to speak for. There is a real housing crisis and a real record of local obstruction, and the instinct to route around both is not a stupid instinct.

But look at what is actually being routed around. The power applies to any scheme over 150 homes, any commercial development over 15,000 square metres, anything above 30 metres — which is to say, precisely the large, contested developments where local scrutiny matters most and is now most easily bypassed. Mayors will also gain "up-front permission," letting building start without the developer applying at all, and a bigger say over how Homes England spends housing money in their patch. The government insists councils will "continue to decide the majority of applications," which is true and beside the point. The majority were never the argument. Nobody was fighting to keep local control of the extension on Mafeking Road. They were fighting to keep it over the 600-unit riverside scheme that changes a town's skyline and its politics for a generation. That is exactly the category now transferred upward.

Here is the part the announcement does not linger on. A council leader who blocks housing can be voted out by the ward that blocked it. A mayor who overrules that council answers to an electorate spread across a city region of two million people, most of whom have never heard of the site in question and will not connect a byelection result to a planning call-in eighteen months later.

This is centralisation wearing a mayoral chain, because a chain is easier to sell than a spreadsheet in Whitehall. The accountability has simply moved one rung up the ladder, out of reach of the people standing directly underneath it.

The honest defence of this is not that it preserves local democracy but that local democracy, at this scale of decision, has been failing and something has to give. Fine. Say that. Do not dress up a transfer of power as an enhancement of it. "Mayors will have a bigger say" is Whitehall for the money now follows mayoral priorities rather than local ones, and a council that disagrees will find its funding as persuasive as its arguments. A consultation on how the call-in power will actually work is due "next week," which means the mechanism by which a resident challenges a mayoral override does not yet exist, and the power to use it does.

There is a control group for this, and it does not flatter the current arrangement. Attlee's government built 200,000 houses a year through local authorities that had genuine housing powers and genuine local mandates, at a moment when the country had far less money and far more urgency than now. Nobody suggested the answer was to strip Salford's housing committee of its authority and hand the decision to the regional grandee. The bottleneck in 1946 was bricks and labour, and the government solved it by building capacity, not by moving the decision to someone harder to find. The bottleneck now, according to every serious account, is largely land supply, planning capacity and viability — problems a call-in power does not solve so much as relocate to a desk with a bigger map and a smaller postbag.

None of which means councils are blameless, or that NIMBYism is a myth invented by developers. Some are exactly as obstructive as the government says. But the remedy for a council that will not decide is a council that can be made to decide — through reformed planning rules, resourced planning departments, a statutory timetable that bites — not a mayor who decides for it. Burnham says challenge cuts both ways. It does. The trouble is that only one direction of that challenge now comes with an off switch for the losing side, and the mayor holds it.