For much of the past decade, a strategic land promoter bringing forward a large site in Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire or another major English city region needed to understand one institution’s priorities particularly closely: the local planning authority that remained the principal local plan-maker and development-management decision-maker for the site. National policy, statutory consultees and infrastructure bodies already mattered, but the local authority was usually the main place where the site’s planning prospects were tested.
That is no longer the complete picture. Across growing parts of England, a statutory strategic tier now operates alongside individual councils, with responsibilities spanning housing, infrastructure, economic development and strategic planning. For the largest schemes, that tier is also being prepared to intervene directly in individual planning applications that would previously have remained primarily with the local authority. The significance is not that every major scheme will suddenly be decided in a mayor’s office, but that the map of influence around strategic development has changed.
Housing numbers can now be settled across several council areas; regional strategies can shape where growth should broadly go; mayors are being equipped to intervene in applications of potential strategic importance; and the same institutions are becoming more closely involved in assembling the funding and infrastructure needed to unlock development. England is not replacing local planning with regional government. It is creating a second strategic decision layer around major sites — one that developers, landowners, advisers and funders need to understand alongside the town hall.
A new tier of government — and a more powerful strategic plan
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026 and establishes the wider Strategic Authority framework within which many of these changes sit. The reform is England-specific: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland retain their own planning and local-government systems.
Strategic Authorities have a broad remit extending well beyond planning, including transport and infrastructure, skills, economic development, regeneration and the environment. For the property industry, however, one of the most consequential changes is the return of statutory strategic spatial planning across large areas.
Combined authorities and combined county authorities will be responsible for producing Spatial Development Strategies once the relevant provisions are fully operative. An SDS is deliberately not a giant local plan. It cannot normally allocate an individual field, industrial estate or redevelopment parcel for development; detailed site allocations remain a local-plan function. Its importance lies elsewhere. Under the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 strategic-planning framework, an operative SDS forms part of the statutory development plan, while local plans must be in general conformity with it.
The latest National Planning Policy Framework housing policies make the consequences clearer still. An SDS is expected to establish a housing requirement for each local planning authority within the strategy area, and those requirements should not normally be reopened at local-plan stage unless circumstances have changed significantly. For a land promoter, the strategic question is therefore no longer confined to whether one council can be persuaded to allocate a particular site. It can also include how much housing the wider area is expected to accommodate, what share is distributed to the individual authority, which broad locations are favoured for growth and what infrastructure the regional strategy expects to support them.
A site can remain unallocated at SDS level while becoming much more — or much less — plausible because of decisions made through the strategic plan. A council allocated a larger housing requirement may need substantially more land than previously expected; another may find regional growth being steered towards different settlements or transport corridors. Those choices can affect the probability and timing of a future site allocation before the detailed local-plan process reaches the land itself.
The governance is not simply mayoral command. In a mayoral combined authority or mayoral combined county authority, adoption of the SDS requires the necessary majority of members and that majority must include the mayor, or the deputy mayor acting in the mayor’s place. The mayor cannot normally impose the strategy alone, but the other members cannot normally adopt it over the mayor’s opposition either. For strategic land businesses, understanding how several constituent authorities and the mayor are negotiating the distribution of growth may therefore become part of the due diligence around a site.
The more direct power: intervening in individual applications
The strategic influence of an SDS is only one side of the reform. More immediately for large schemes, the 2026 Act creates the primary legislative architecture for extending outside London mayoral powers over planning applications of potential strategic importance. Depending on the final regulations, a mayor could call in a qualifying application and become the local planning authority for determining it, or direct the local authority to refuse it.
The detailed non-London framework is not yet operational. The government’s consultation on planning powers for mayors in England closed on 5 October 2026, and the responses will inform the secondary legislation and final procedure. The government’s stated intention is to lay the PSI secondary legislation by the end of 2026 and set a commencement date in early 2027, subject to the consultation outcome and parliamentary scheduling.
Four proposed day-one thresholds are particularly relevant to major development: more than 150 homes; more than 15,000 square metres of non-residential floorspace or mixed-use development; a building over 30 metres high; and development that increases an existing building’s height by 15 metres or more and results in it exceeding 30 metres.
Those are the headline large-scale categories rather than the whole proposed regime. The consultation also sets out categories covering major infrastructure, energy development, Green Belt cases, loss of housing capacity and development affecting particular strategic policies or places, with some of those wider categories proposed to become available only once the relevant SDS has been adopted.
The timing creates an important transitional issue. An earlier policy position envisaged the outside-London development-management powers becoming available once a mayor had an adopted SDS. The government now proposes giving mayors the core powers sooner, allowing them to intervene in major applications while their regional strategy is still being prepared. Before SDS adoption, the consultation proposes that intervention should be connected to housing or economic growth and supported by sound planning reasons; after adoption, the strategy itself would provide the principal strategic framework.
For developers with large applications already moving through pre-application work, outline submissions or committee timetables, that transition matters. A mayor could acquire meaningful intervention powers before the new regional growth pattern is fully settled, making emerging SDS work, mayoral growth priorities and the existing local development plan relevant at the same time rather than in a neat sequence.
London already demonstrates how direct mayoral involvement can work, although its regime is not being copied wholesale. Since 11 May 2026, qualifying Category 3J applications for 50 or more homes must be notified to the Mayor when the borough receives them. If the local planning authority later becomes minded to refuse the application, it must notify City Hall again, after which the Mayor has 21 days to consider whether to direct that the application be determined by him. The City Hall referral guidance sets out that two-stage process. The 50-home threshold is materially lower than the proposed 150-home day-one housing threshold elsewhere, but it offers a useful preview of why major-site promoters may need to understand mayoral policy as well as council policy.
Mayoral Development Orders add another potential route by allowing a mayor to create a planning-consent framework for specified development without every project following the conventional application route. The government intends to lay the secondary legislation and implement the MDO legal framework by the end of 2026, subject to the consultation outcome and parliamentary scheduling. Expanded Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy powers outside London are also provided for, but further regulations are required; the current proposal is that an SDS should already be in place before a non-London mayor can charge MCIL. Primary legislation therefore creates significant new tools, but it is still essential to distinguish powers that exist in statute from powers that can already be exercised operationally.
Why “strategic importance” is the right way to think about the change
These reforms do not give mayors a general appeal mechanism over every planning decision. The government’s model is explicitly concerned with strategic development management. Most householder applications, modest residential projects and routine commercial schemes will continue to be handled through local planning authorities.
The significance lies at the upper end of the market: major housing, tall buildings, strategically important infrastructure and schemes whose effects extend beyond a single council’s immediate interests. That scale also explains the tension at the centre of the reform. The Local Government Association’s position on the devolution reforms supports stronger strategic planning in principle while warning against mayoral intervention displacing the knowledge, leadership and democratic accountability of elected local councillors and their communities.
For developers and investors, the concern looks different. Real Estate’s response to the mayoral-powers consultation supports greater devolution where it can unlock housing, infrastructure and investment, but asks for clear call-in criteria, safeguards against duplicated process, additional cost and delay, and greater certainty over how the powers will operate before an SDS has been adopted. It also argues that future MCIL arrangements need to recognise development viability and existing financial obligations.
Those two perspectives expose the practical challenge more clearly than the legislation alone. Councils are concerned about preserving legitimate local decision-making; the property industry is concerned that an additional strategic tier should improve delivery rather than become another uncertain stage in the planning process. The value of the new system will depend heavily on whether it can resolve genuinely cross-boundary questions without creating parallel negotiations that slow schemes down.
For a promoter, the sensible response is not to bypass the local authority in favour of the mayor. Major schemes may require two-track engagement: a credible local planning case alongside a persuasive explanation of how the proposal supports wider housing, infrastructure, regeneration and economic-growth priorities. A proposal supported regionally but resisted locally may occupy a very different strategic position from one opposed at both levels; equally, a scheme that satisfies a council’s immediate objectives but conflicts with the emerging SDS may face a regional problem that previously carried less weight.
What this means for developers, landowners and strategic land businesses
For schemes comfortably below the eventual PSI thresholds, the day-to-day development-management relationship with the local planning authority is unlikely to change dramatically in the near term. The SDS can nevertheless matter indirectly if it changes the authority’s housing requirement, identifies another part of the city region as the priority growth corridor or links development expectations to major transport and infrastructure investment.
The effect on strategic land can be considerably greater. A promoter assessing a large site now needs to ask not only whether the land can secure an allocation in the local plan, but whether it fits the spatial logic taking shape at mayoral level. A higher housing requirement could increase the amount of land a council needs to identify; regional infrastructure investment could improve the prospects of one growth corridor while weakening another. Both can feed into promotion strategy, option values, acquisition decisions and the realistic timetable for bringing land forward.
Engagement earlier in the strategic-plan process may therefore have commercial value. Waiting until a local plan reaches site-allocation stage could mean entering the debate after assumptions about housing distribution, broad growth locations and supporting infrastructure have already hardened. That does not turn an SDS into a site-allocation exercise, but it can make the regional strategy an important upstream influence on which sites later become credible local-plan candidates.
Applications close to the proposed PSI categories introduce a second layer of due diligence. Promoters will need to understand whether a scheme falls within the immediate large-scale thresholds, whether wider SDS-linked categories could later capture it, and how mayoral priorities interact with the local authority’s position. London developers have long operated with a version of this dual perspective, reading borough policy alongside the London Plan and City Hall priorities; the emerging system elsewhere will not be identical, but some of the commercial behaviour it encourages may become familiar.
The funding dimension is becoming harder to separate from the planning one. On 2 October 2026, Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, Homes England and the National Housing Bank signed England’s first Place Delivery Agreement. The model is explicitly described as moving beyond collaboration towards co-delivery, aligning national expertise, land and investment capability behind mayoral housing and regeneration priorities.
For a strategic site promoter, that makes the mayoral tier relevant in a third way. It is becoming not only a strategic plan-maker and potential decision-maker for the largest applications, but a participant in assembling the investment, public land, infrastructure support and delivery capacity capable of unlocking difficult sites. A proposal aligned with an SDS, Local Growth Plan and future place-based investment programme could therefore operate in a materially different delivery environment from one that is acceptable in narrow local-plan terms but detached from regional infrastructure and investment priorities.
What to watch next
The immediate issue is the government’s response to the consultation and the secondary legislation setting the final PSI categories, procedures and commencement date. Early 2027 is the current target for the main application powers, but developers should treat the final regulations rather than the consultation thresholds as the operative rules once they are made.
The relationship between those first intervention powers and emerging Spatial Development Strategies will be particularly important. If the government proceeds with its proposed transitional approach, major applications could face mayoral involvement before a completed SDS exists, placing unusual weight on emerging strategy and published growth priorities during the interim period.
Strategic planning itself is moving quickly. The September 2026 NPPF already establishes the expectation that SDSs distribute housing requirements between local planning authorities rather than merely describing broad aspirations for growth. Brownfield policy remains another area to watch: the legislation provides for further regulations governing the treatment of brownfield land within strategic planning, but the required regulations have not yet been made and published.
The direction of travel is nevertheless clear enough for the property industry to respond now. Major housing sites in England are being shaped by two connected planning geographies: the local authority that still controls detailed local planning and most applications, and a strategic tier that can influence housing distribution, broad growth locations, strategic infrastructure, selected major applications and the funding architecture around delivery. The town hall remains central, but understanding only the town hall is becoming less sufficient.
This article provides general information about housing and planning policy in England and does not constitute planning, legal or investment advice. Several of the mayoral development-management powers described are provided for in primary legislation but remain dependent on secondary legislation or commencement. Developers and landowners should confirm the current statutory and policy position for the relevant area and proposal before relying on it.
