After promising to end rough sleeping by Christmas, cap English bus fares at £2 and ‘culturally reset’ Westminster, Andy Burnham has unveiled his latest metropolitan secret weapon: mayors. In an effort to turbo-charge regional development and prevent Nimbys from blocking desperately needed new housing, Burnham has proposed extending the planning powers currently and solely enjoyed by the Mayor of London to all of England’s 14 devolved mayors. As with Sadiq Khan, this would enable them to ‘call in’ strategically significant schemes and have the final say in overriding local authority planning decisions with either approvals or refusals.
Burnham, himself the former Mayor of Greater Manchester, believes his strategy will help reinvigorate Labour’s beleaguered headline commitment to building 1.5 million homes in the life of this parliament. This target was defiantly reaffirmed last month by reappointed Housing Secretary Angela Rayner.
The way to appease most opponents isn’t mayoral tinkering
England’s devolution settlement should be deepened – as Policy Exchange has argued over the last decade – but it also needs to be improved. Without this, far from being a dogged driver of development, London’s mayoral powers have sometimes been a virulent obstacle to it. Between his first and third elections in May 2016 and April 2024, Sadiq Khan ‘called in’ 28 schemes and approved most of them. But he also refused ten other major projects, using his powers to force councils to reject developments without calling them in.
