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.
Moreover, many of the schemes Khan has blocked – which include the Tulip skyscraper in the City of London, the £800 million Sphere in Stratford and a 700+ home development in Charlton – have been significant, multi-million-pound developments. Their refusal has aroused exactly the same intense systemic frustrations that Burnham envisages his proposals will expunge.
Sadly, the idea that English mayors are a magical panacea for stagnant housebuilding is fanciful. If London’s mayoral planning powers are the solution to Britain’s housing crisis, then why does our capital city have the most acute housing crisis in the country?
But away from London, there are other structural reasons why Burnham’s plans stand little chance of success. Unfortunately – and with few exceptions – the quality of mayors England’s devolution experiment has produced has been distinctly substandard. With the possible exception of Khan, they are rarely willing to be either controversial or unpopular. Unlike French mayors, who have been known to brazenly incorporate fines from Paris into their local budgets, they rarely deviate from the party line.
While in countries like France and the US, a mayoralty is usually seen as a springboard for those who want to enter national government, in England it is more often seen as a landing pad for those who can’t enter it – with Burnham and Boris Johnson being obvious exceptions. If Burnham giving mayors extra powers attracts better mayoral candidates, then this would be a welcome outcome. But presuming that extra powers will transform substandard mayors into exceptional ones will only trigger growth in one area: disappointment.
The combined constituencies of devolved mayors in England are also something of a geographical oddity. While a Mayor of London makes sense, it is unclear why cities as distinct as Bradford and Leeds should fall under the same municipal umbrella. Global precedents prove that mayors are most effective when they maintain a localised and forensic focus over singular towns and cities. Applying them to English regions suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the mayoral concept and a haphazard lurch towards municipal convenience.
Burnham’s plans also seek to vanquish the perennial bogeyman of British housebuilding: the Nimby. Yet it is one of our most stubborn myths that Nimbys are the main cause of the housing crisis. There is not a single Nimby in Britain who enjoys an iota of statutory power, held by local councils alone.
Yes, Nimbys can be stubborn and inconvenient but their influence is determined solely by the extent to which the local authority is prepared to let them exercise it. As the City of London (which recently ignored almost 4,000 objections to the redevelopment of Liverpool Street station) bluntly proves, there is no statutory impediment to that influence being nil.
There will always be a rear guard of those who wish to cancel all new developments. But the way to appease most opponents isn’t mayoral tinkering: it lies in better housing design, more local involvement and stronger political will.
Fiorello La Guardia, the celebrated Republican mayor of New York from 1934 to 1946, once summarised the allure of mayoralty when he quipped ‘there is no Democratic or Republican way to clean the streets’. This remains true today: electorates look to mayors to offer dedicated, non-partisan civic leadership wholeheartedly committed to the betterment of our urban condition. The recent economic booms in Texas and Florida have reaffirmed this legacy and have demonstrated that mayors can be powerful instigators of growth and regeneration.
But these mayors do not have to contend with the structural corrodent that Burnham’s plans must: the presence of a discretionary, quasi-judicial planning system where local vested interests repeatedly create a powerful political incentive to either refuse or award planning permission, regardless of whether a mayor or a council is in charge. Unless this fundamental problem is addressed by replacing the current planning system with the rules and zoning-based alternative Policy Exchange has long recommended, Burnham’s plans are likely to change nothing.
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