A series of announcements over the weekend suggests the Government is doing more than simply reforming planning. It is beginning to reshape where power, and the capacity to exercise it, sits within the English state.
New planning powers for mayors
The headline proposal is to give mayors across England new “call-in” powers over major planning applications, bringing them closer to powers already held by the Mayor of London.
The proposed thresholds include schemes of more than 150 homes, more than 15,000 sq m of commercial space, or buildings over 30 metres. Mayors could take control of strategically important applications and determine them directly, as well as direct refusal in certain circumstances.
Councils will continue to decide the majority of applications, and many are already getting homes built at scale. The proposed changes are therefore less about replacing local planning authorities and more about creating an additional route for intervention where a scheme has wider strategic importance.
For developers, this could materially change the stakeholder landscape. On larger schemes, engagement may increasingly need to extend beyond the host local authority to the mayor and combined authority.
The practical implications could include:
- Earlier political engagement with mayors and combined authorities on major schemes.
- A new route to unblock stalled applications, including proposals for applicants to request mayoral intervention where statutory determination periods have passed.
- Greater importance for regional growth strategies, particularly where projects involve housing, infrastructure, energy or major economic investment.
SDSs become increasingly important
The reforms also need to be viewed alongside emerging Spatial Development Strategies (SDSs).
SDSs will give mayors a stronger role in deciding where growth, infrastructure and major development should be directed across their regions. This potentially moves engagement even further upstream. Developers may need to influence the strategic framework long before an individual planning application reaches committee.
Once an SDS is in place, the proposed mayoral powers could also extend further into infrastructure, including solar and onshore wind projects between 50MW and 100MW and standalone battery storage of 100MW or more.
Data centres are less explicitly addressed. Some may fall within the commercial floorspace threshold, but floorspace alone does not capture their strategic significance, particularly around power demand, grid connections and economic growth. Their treatment within future SDSs will therefore be worth watching.
Unblocking growth or moving the politics?
There is an obvious tension in the proposals. The same mechanism that could rescue a strategically important scheme from local political or procedural difficulties could also move a highly controversial decision away from the councillors closest to the affected community.
The reform does not take politics out of planning. For the most important schemes, it potentially moves that politics from the town hall to the city-region.
Alongside these new powers sits a more practical question about whether combined authorities have the capacity to use them effectively. The Government’s decision to second between five and ten civil servants into mayoral authorities from this autumn suggests it recognises that devolving responsibility without the people and expertise to deliver it would risk falling short.
Those secondments should help build capability in the short term, particularly in areas such as planning, infrastructure and commercial delivery, but they do not yet amount to a long-term workforce model. If mayoral intervention is to speed up decision-making rather than add another layer to the process, combined authorities will need sufficient permanent resource, clear governance and strong links with existing local authority teams.
Taken together with the emergence of SDSs, the reforms point towards a more strategic and more mayoral planning system. For developers, that means understanding the priorities of the combined authority, and engaging early in the preparation of the SDS, may become just as important as navigating the politics and processes of the local planning authority itself.