Allowing mayors to overrule councillors on planning decisions would take power away from communities - Andrew Vine

Our ward councillors visited, walked over the site with us, asked sensible and probing questions about local concerns, took advice from their professional planning officers and argued successfully for the plans to be denied permission. The sports ground is still there, a focus for the community, where every weekend the air is filled with the sound of children playing football and rugby.

With support from the council, the new houses were eventually built on former industrial land nearby, which was transformed from something of an eyesore into a smart residential area, an outcome everyone locally welcomed.

I felt then, and still do, that this was an example of local democracy at its best, with both councillors and officers using expertise and knowledge of their patch to make fair and informed judgements that reflected the wider context of what was best for the neighbourhood.

All over Yorkshire, councillors and officers are making judgements like this every day, balancing the need for new housing or other developments against local concerns and striving for outcomes that deliver the most benefit.

It is essential work that over generations has shaped and safeguarded neighbourhoods, but you’d never know it from listening to this government. Instead, in its telling, councils are obstacles in the way of progress, to be steamrollered if they don’t toe the party line.

That’s the conclusion to be drawn from the government’s intention to give mayors the power to override local authority planning decisions by “calling in” schemes they judge to be strategically significant.

In other words, however misguided a development appears to councillors or highly skilled officials and despite vociferous local objections, a mayor could let it go ahead anyway.

There is a great irony in this scheme being touted by a Prime Minister who during his much-vaunted time as mayor of Manchester laid heavy emphasis on being in touch with local sentiment and a man who listened to people’s views.

Not any more, apparently. Soon, it seems, residents who object to inappropriate developments on their doorsteps will be told they can either like them or lump them as a consequence of the government’s failing attempts to fulfil its pledge to get the economy moving by building 1.5m new homes by the end of this parliament, a target that is vanishingly unlikely to be met.

Last week, the Conservative leader of East Riding of Yorkshire Council, Anne Handley, condemned the new powers as “not democratic”, saying they were taking decision-making away from local people.

She’s absolutely right. Even though the mayors who will potentially overrule councils are all elected, the intention of the devolution deals which brought them into being was never to stamp on local authority decisions. The idea was to bring every authority within a city region together, working more closely and effectively towards strategic objectives for the greater good.

Nobody ever mentioned devolution meaning mayors would ride roughshod over local concerns, and if they do so it will further undermine Andy Burnham’s already shaky claims to be decentralising power.

In Yorkshire, we’re already seeing this for the fiction it is, with the plan to convert the former RAF base at Linton-on-Ouse into a detention centre for migrants likely to be pushed through by ministers despite the bitter opposition of residents, local authorities, the area’s mayor and MPs.

The same high-handed attitude that the government knows best and will not tolerate dissent is to be seen in solar and wind farms being waved through by the Energy Secretary despite objections from local authorities and residents.

Councils being overruled on planning is only another form of the same mindset and it should not come as a surprise from a government that has expressed hostility towards local democracy since coming to power.

Throughout his premiership, Sir Keir Starmer was disparaging towards councils and their constituents who had the temerity to object to inappropriate developments.

They were derided as “nimbys” and “blockers” who stood in the way of essential economic development, and in for a nasty surprise because the government wouldn’t allow them to win. It seems that Mr Burnham holds the same view.