Chris Hinchliff, MP writes
In its dying days, the Starmer government is forcing through legislation that would demolish what remains of our democratic planning system.
With thanks to Tribune
An old quote still drifts around the legacy of Labour’s post-war Government: that it aimed to ‘tie so many knots’ in Britain’s architecture of power and distribution of wealth that ‘the Tories would never be able to untie them all’.
It now seems that in the dying embers of the Starmer Government, Labour is doing its opponents work for them, with the determined unpicking of the last remnants of the democratic planning system which steered Britain’s reconstruction from the ashes of the Second World War.
Last week, in a quiet Committee Room in Westminster, with less than an hour’s debate, a small group of MPs hand-picked by party whips voted for a little-known and even less understood Bill: the snappily-titled Town and Country Planning (Discharge of Local Planning Authority Functions) (England) Regulations 2026. The detail might seem obscure, but the impact on people’s lives and on our democracy is anything but.
Under these rules, almost all planning decisions that are currently democratically scrutinised by planning committees will be made behind closed doors by unelected officers. Some categories will be compulsory, like smaller housing developments, or the crucial design stage for applications under 500 homes (height, green space, traffic access), and controversial permitted development office-to-housing conversions that often produce overcrowded, overheated or poorly ventilated homes. Everything else, from incinerators to major housing developments will be expected to be taken out of Councillors hands in all but ‘exceptional circumstances’.
Crucially, local Councillors will lose the power to require a committee to vote on an application that is a significant issue for their community. With no committees for the vast majority of decisions, the public lose their right to speak for a few minutes in front of those deciding on the future of their local area.
The damage done to local democracy is totally disproportionate to any promised increase in the amount of housing delivered. Even the Government’s own figures, when marking its own homework as generously as possible, estimate the change will deliver just a few hundred extra homes a year nationwide. Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut is an understatement.
The democratic discretion of planning committees is being scapegoated for a broken housing market despite the fact that just 1.5 percent of all planning decisions are overturned by the Planning Inspectorate on review. None of this will build the genuinely affordable homes we desperately need. It is not a lack of permissions that holds the system back – developers are already sitting on well over a million approved applications.
That’s not to say we don’t need real action to make the planning system work again. Decades of botched reforms, coupled with Conservative underfunding that stripped up to half the resources from planning departments has turned the radical brilliance of Lewis Silkin’s 1947 planning settlement into a nightmarish mess.
The point a Labour Government should understand when trying to address this is that democracy, and public involvement in choosing what gets built where, are forces for good.
Silkin rightly chose to build a planning system that would ‘reflect actual needs, democratically expressed’. Rather than treating the public as a problem to be silenced, we should be seeking to rebuild planning to end the farcical situation where we have plenty of process, but it delivers neither social license to build, nor sustainable outcomes, nor genuinely affordable homes.
The truth is that most people, including in rural areas, do support new homes, and understand how important it is to keep their local area thriving. What they don’t want to see is swathes of the countryside next door trashed for the sake of greed, or grey estates with sky-high property prices that do nothing to meet local needs. Making the public genuine partners in shaping the future of their own area is the best way to secure social license for housing and to eliminate the conflict that so often marks the current developer-led system.
With a little idealism, it is not hard to imagine a planning system which empowers communities to decide for themselves where, how and in what way their housing needs should be met: one that gives councils the tools to assemble environmentally sound sites without speculative value tacked on, and invests in the council housing revolution we promised.
Labour’s post-war Government was not restrained by the pessimism implicit in the Bill now before MPs. Silkin could have created a national planning board with no democratic input and avoided the intricacies of a participatory system – but he didn’t. That decision was the right one. As the TCPA’s Hugh Ellis points out, ‘politicians at the time recognised that the decisions which have a profound impact on localities are best made at local level. In a democracy, people have a right to expect a measure of control over the decisions which affect their lives. Removing that accountability erodes the basis of our local democracy.’
Cleaving to that pro-democracy decision now is also a matter of basic political judgement. Abandoning it will simply redirect anger at Labour MPs and Labour Ministers.
The political blunder the Government is making will soon be felt when the emails start pouring in as constituents wake up to realise that they and their representatives have been reduced to bystanders in the future of their own community. The frustration expressed through democratic processes won’t disappear with their removal – only the pressure valves for releasing it. And when that happens, frustration will harden into contempt, inevitably spilling over into support for parties like Reform and the Greens.
When introducing the Town and Country Planning Act, Silkin called it ‘an instrument in which we can be justly proud’ for ‘we shall have begun a new era in the life of this country, an era in which human happiness, beauty, and culture will play a greater part in its social and economic life than they have ever done before.’
Labour has to learn to love democracy again and rediscover our belief that we get better outcomes when we put power in the hands of ordinary people instead of profit-motivated corporations. At the very moment we are promising unprecedented devolution, it is absurd to be removing the rights of Councillors for being too responsive to their residents’ needs or trying to procedurally stifle legitimate concerns about speculative development rather than addressing them.
We committed in our manifesto to ‘transfer power out of Westminster, and into our communities’. We must live up to that promise. If we’ve given up on local democracy and believe engagement with the people who voted for us is nothing more than a hinderance, we shouldn’t be surprised when the communities we’ve insulted respond in kind.
Labour Campaign for Council Housing 