The Yes Now Comes From One Man, Not a Chamber
Matthew Pennycook stood up this week and announced that mayors across England will get the power to overrule local councils on planning applications above 150 homes, above 15,000 square metres of commercial space, or above 30 metres tall — roughly ten storeys. These are not garden-extension numbers. They are small-town numbers. A scheme that size changes a skyline, a school catchment, a bus route, and until now it needed a council's yes. From now on, in thirteen mayoral areas including Greater Manchester and Liverpool, it can get a yes from one person instead of a chamber of them, and that yes can be issued before the developer has even filed a normal application.
Pennycook called the powers "essential." Essential is doing a lot of work in that sentence, so let's translate it properly: the government has decided that the problem with British housebuilding is too much local input, and the fix is less of it.
Andy Burnham, who spent nearly a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester before becoming Prime Minister, put the justification to the Sunday Times himself. "Challenge does need to be made to local decision-making," he said, "and actually it cuts both ways." Sometimes the council is the one blocking something the area needs, he argued, so the mayor needs the power to check it. Except the legislation only runs one way. A mayor can overrule a council; a council cannot overrule a mayor.
Here is the case for it, honestly stated, because it isn't stupid. Sadiq Khan has held call-in powers in London since 2018, and Pennycook points to them as proof of concept — the mayor, he says, "unblocked strategic growth sites" that boroughs had spent years sitting on. Labour promised 1.5 million homes by the end of the decade, housebuilders are already warning it won't happen, and a government running out of runway has a reasonable instinct to remove veto points rather than add them. Fragmented planning committees, each protecting its own ward, are genuinely bad at building the sort of large, multi-borough infrastructure a housing programme actually needs. A mayor with a spatial strategy for a whole city region is, on paper, better placed to see the thing whole.
On paper. The trouble with citing London as your evidence is that London is also the answer to the question of whether this works, and the answer sitting right there in the same article as the announcement is: housebuilding in London has fallen in recent years. Not despite Khan's call-in power. Alongside it. The mechanism the government is rolling out nationally is the one that's been running for seven years in the one place it's been tried, and the city hasn't hit its numbers. That's not evidence for the policy. That's the control group failing.
What actually changes for the resident objecting to the scheme going up behind her street is worse than a change of decision-maker. It's a change of forum. Object to your council and you can turn up to a planning committee, speak for three minutes, and if you don't like the answer, vote the committee out next May — that's slow and often futile, but it's yours. Object to a call-in decision, or to a scheme granted upfront permission so the developer never has to apply to the council at all, and your remaining route runs through judicial review — a High Court challenge, on narrow legal grounds, argued by barristers, decided by a judge you didn't elect and can't remove. The Conservatives, not natural defenders of local democracy this year, at least named the thing correctly: councils are losing "the ability to make planning decisions in their own communities." The Liberal Democrats called it a "direct attack." Both are right about the mechanism even if you disagree about the verdict.
The deeper problem isn't that mayors are unelected — they aren't, and pretending otherwise is a cheap shot the Lib Dems occasionally can't resist. The problem is scale of accountability. A ward councillor answers to a few thousand people for a decision about their street. A mayor answers to a city region of millions for a decision about your street, buried somewhere on page nine of a four-year record that also includes buses, policing, and a mayoral manifesto nobody read past the transport bit. Accountability hasn't vanished. It's been diluted until it's too weak to taste.
Burnham spent his Manchester decade making one argument to Westminster: bring power closer to the people it affects, because distance is where accountability goes to die. He was right. It is a genuinely strange thing to watch him become the man who, on reaching Downing Street, took power over a specific 151-home scheme in Salford away from the councillors who sit closest to it and handed it to whoever holds his old job. Somewhere this autumn a mayor most of the ward has never met will sign off a tower block their own council said no to, and the only room left to argue in will have a judge in it, not a ballot box.