GIVING mayors the power to overrule councils on urban planning plays on Andy Burnham’s mystique, but will not solve the housing crisis.

For all its veneer of localism, it continues the hollowing-out of local government we have seen for decades — which Burnham himself rightly identified, alongside the privatisation of economic power, as one of the great anti-democratic tendencies of British politics since the 1980s.

Like the planning reforms pushed by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the proposal is misconceived: it blames the housing shortage on a mix of red tape and Nimbyism, and assumes that letting big developers do what they want will increase supply.

In fact — as Morning Star columnist Solomon Hughes has repeatedly exposed — the housing shortage suits the main house-construction companies perfectly.

“Big five” house-builders like Taylor Wimpey depend for their profits on scarcity. Its executives state openly to their AGMs that their focus on “price optimisation” and land-banking (buying up land to set aside for future development, driving land prices up) keeps the money rolling in to the shareholders.

Since for-profit builders want house prices high, they have no interest in reducing the housing shortage, and in Taylor Wimpey’s case have even cited the huge gap between supply and demand as a core strength of the business they’re in.

Starmer and Reeves wanted to scrap environmental protections, whinging that bats, newts and on one occasion rare spiders were preventing development. Burnham wants executive mayors to have wider powers to overrule objections from councils. Neither approach resolves the conflict of interest at the heart of housing construction. Publicly funded and publicly delivered council housing is the way to do that.

Indeed, empowering developers in this way may actually reduce the supply of affordable housing.

The government talks about “levelling up” executive mayors with London, whose mayor already has these powers.

But not only has house-building actually collapsed in London over the last decade — research published at the start of the year found construction began on 5,547 new residential homes across the capital in 2025, an 84 per cent drop on the figure a decade earlier — but developers use the resulting scarcity to bargain their way out of affordable housing commitments.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan came to office demanding 50 per cent of all new residential developments be affordable housing. Soon, under pressure from the construction industry, he reduced that to 35 per cent. Last winter that was shrunk again, to 20 per cent.

This kick in the teeth for working-class Londoners was justified with the usual guff: reducing these obligations would incentivise more house-building, increasing supply, reducing prices. The same market myth that has created Britain’s housing crisis.

Worse still, Burnham’s policy would also give mayors these powers when it comes to large commercial developments.

This at a time when local councils face mounting public anger over approvals for data centres to feed US Big Tech’s race for AI supremacy with China — centres whose demands on local water resources and lifetime emissions make them ecological disasters.

Burnham’s myth is that, as Manchester mayor, he avoided the political point-scoring of Westminster and “got stuff done.” Now, he will empower other mayors to do the same.

Though his mayoralty delivered positive results in some sectors — notably transport — its record on urban development is less rosy. Books like Isaac Rose’s The Rentier City detail the corporate redevelopment of Manchester, backroom deals and public-private partnerships that have seen residents forcibly relocated and rents driven ever upward.

This is not devolution, but centralisation, taking decision-making power further away from local representatives. It does not empower local citizens but corporate developers. It does not address the causes of the housing crisis.

It is more of the same, and more evidence that Burnham is a prisoner of the same rotten politics he promised to consign to the past.