Andy Burnham must scrap his nonsense emergency powers plan

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Tory Assembly Member Susan Hall issues a warning about Lord Khan hoarding more powers

Devolution is something of a flagship policy for Andy Burnham, as he attempts to stake his political legacy on what he sees as the unwieldy and lumbering totality of the British state.

But whatever his lofty ideals, it seems to be a classic case of saying one thing and doing the other.

As we have seen with recent proposed changes to the planning system in London, power is actually being taken away from local authorities and centralised in the Mayor.

Under the Planning & Infrastructure Act, the Mayor gets "emergency planning powers" which make Lord Khan the official sign-off for any planning applications of more than 50 units.

At the same time, applications of 10 units or fewer, or indeed minor changes such as extensions, are given to council officers, rather than the traditional planning committees chaired by councillors.

By cutting away at the top and bottom of the spectrum of applications, the Government has managed to render Council Planning Committees virtually worthless by so strictly narrowing the scope of applications that can come before them.

I'm worried about what this means for London, which the Government has given a target to build more than 80,000 homes a year.

Lord Khan has already begun pushing to build on green spaces, and his new draft London Plan is pushing for as many as 56,000 homes on London's greenbelt over the lifetime of the plan.

At the moment, if a developer wants to bulldoze over your park to replace it with high rises, you can call your local councillor and lobby your authority to prevent the scheme taking place.

It is local democracy, devolution, in action: local decisions are taken by local authorities elected by the people whom the decisions will impact.

But under Lord Khan's new powers, that application will never come to your local council; instead it will land on his desk at City Hall to be signed off by our Mayor without any care for the community who will be affected.

If you were a developer thinking about building 40 units on greenbelt land in, say, Bexley, Bromley, or Havering, you know you'd meet resistance from residents.

So why would you not add another 10-15 units to take it over the threshold to go to the Mayor instead of the council?

Worse still, if the parcel of land you're intending to develop is not big enough to fit those 10-15 units as family homes, you're just going to build higher and higher, until what was once an open field or community park instead becomes a corner-cutting high-rise.

If Andy Burnham really believes in the principle of devolution - that is, that the people who live in an area know best how to make decisions about the issues affecting them – he would scrap these nonsense emergency planning powers, which serve only to strip local communities of their powers to govern themselves.

Centralising power in regional Mayors is not devolution at all.

He can spin it however he likes, but taking powers off local authorities to package them into regional mayors is simply centralising government into feudal tiers of decision-making that gets further and further from the people these policies are supposed to empower.

I don't like it one bit; if the new Prime Minister is serious about giving the levers of power back to local communities, he should do the right thing and rectify this situation before we lose our green spaces for good.

To lift from a popular slogan, devolution means devolution - it should not mean regional centralisation.