Burnham’s planning reform empowers developers, not people — and will do nothing for housing supply

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.