Mayoral planning powers: a strategic safety net or another layer of risk?

Birmingham Council House

New call-in powers could unlock strategic development, but may also add another political layer to a planning system being reformed to reduce delay and discretion.

The Government has announced that mayors across England will be given London-style powers to call in major planning applications in their areas.

The policy is explicitly pro-growth. Schemes of more than 150 homes, more than 15,000 sq m of commercial space or any building over 30 metres could fall within scope. Mayors would be able to take over key decisions and direct a council to take a scheme forward—or refuse it.

A strategic safety net?

A regionally elected mayor can look beyond individual wards or council boundaries and consider how development supports housing need, jobs, transport and investment across a wider geography.

Where an allocated or policy-compliant scheme is stalled by a council responding to local opposition, mayoral intervention could provide an important safety net.

It could also align planning decisions more closely with infrastructure and housing funding that is increasingly controlled at strategic-authority level.

Or another political process?

However, while the policy is pro-growth, it is not deregulatory.

The direction of planning reform has been towards greater consistency and fewer discretionary interventions. The Government’s NPPF reforms are intended to make national policy clearer and more directive.

The national scheme of delegation, which takes effect on 31 October, creates a presumption that most applications should be determined by officers and limits the circumstances in which they can be referred to committee.

Mayoral call-in powers pull in a different direction. Developers may now need to navigate three political tiers: the local planning authority, the mayoral strategic authority and, in exceptional cases, ministers.

That creates another set of relationships to manage, another potential stage in the timetable and an additional source of uncertainty for land, funding and delivery.

The announcement makes clear that mayors could refuse applications as well as support them. A council may be prepared to approve a project, only for a mayor to take a different position.

Which policy framework applies?

There is also a question about the basis on which mayoral decisions will be made.

The Government says every decision must follow planning rules, the local plan and national policy. But mayors will also oversee emerging Spatial Development Strategies, which, once adopted, will form part of the development plan, guide local plans and set the strategic framework for housing, infrastructure and economic growth.

How will the system work while those strategies are being prepared? What weight will be given to an emerging SDS? And which will carry the greatest practical influence?

Clarity is needed

The detailed proposals will determine whether the reform accelerates development or simply creates an additional process. The final framework will need precise call-in criteria, transparent decision-making, firm time limits and clear rules governing the relationship between local plans, SDSs and national policy.

Intervention should be exceptional and focused on genuinely strategic cases, rather than becoming a parallel planning process.

For developers and investors, mayoral engagement may now need to become part of planning strategy from the outset, particularly for schemes above the proposed thresholds.

Mayors could provide a decisive route through when local politics blocks otherwise sound development. But if the new power becomes another point of veto, it risks undermining the certainty and speed that the rest of the planning reform programme is designed to create.