Ike Ijeh

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.

When Tony Blair and his team were deciding which venue should host his first speech as Prime Minister after his landslide 1997 election victory, they did not choose Downing Street or Whitehall or Parliament. They instead chose a much more unlikely setting, the notorious Aylesbury council estate in south-east London. Why? Because New Labour presentational dark arts aside, it brutally epitomised the deprivation, devastation and despair of those Blair went on to refer to in his speech as ‘the forgotten people’, a dispossessed social diaspora with whom Britain’s failed council estates had become hopelessly synonymous. It is these people we desperately need to invigorate.

Is an anti-beauty coalition building in the heart of government? Back in August, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) controversially deleted “beauty” as a strategic priority in a National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) update, effectively removing it as a specific, statutory requirement for new houses. Labour’s Achilles’ heel has often been a default to centralised utilitarianism Next, Housing Secretary Angela Rayner dismissed the word “beautiful” as “subjective” and broadly meaningless. Now, we learn that the Office for Place – the government body created to ensure design quality in new housing – has been scrapped.