Strategic planning has spent 15 years in limbo. Aspirations to reinstate it are now becoming machinery, following the launch of the Government’s 24 August 2026 consultation on Planning powers for mayors in England.
I previously said that Strategic planning creates a challenge of subsidiarity, but not doing it creates competing (far worse) challenges of unaccountability, intransigence, under-delivery, stasis and mistrust.
This series of blogs on Mayors and the New Machinery of English devolution explains the new architecture of larger than local planning and the key issues coming out of the emerging proposals for the detail.
Parliamentary Time Well Spent – The New Architecture
The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 (P&IA 2025) created a new statutory tier of Spatial Development Strategies (SDSs) across England. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 (Empowerment Act) has gone rather under the radar and has made a more striking set of changes that are now coming into play.
The Empowerment Act allows a large part of the machinery of both planning and ‘doing’ strategic to be put in the hands of City and Region mayors. They are about to receive a remarkably broad set of planning, land and delivery tools.
The Empowerment Act allows regulations to be made enabling mayors to:
- Intervene in planning applications
- Grant their own permissions through Mayoral Development Orders (MDOs)
- Put in place their own Mayoral CIL.
The first two powers are intended to be operational by early 2027.
The way that these new powers come into force will remake the governance of major development decisions in England.
Back to (sub)Regional Planning?
The new architecture is set up by a new Part 1A (sections 12A–12X) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 – see the summary below. This means that housing requirements, strategic infrastructure and broad patterns of development can again be considered across housing market, transport and economic geographies that sit above existing local authority areas.
The August 2026 NPPF now confirms that SDSs should:
- look ahead at least 25 years, and
- be genuinely strategic, rather than becoming a local plan by stealth.
| Provision | Does What? | So What? |
| new s12A PCPA 2004 | Requires every Strategic Planning Authority (SPA) to prepare an SDS | Strategic planning becomes mandatory |
| ss12B–12C | Allows the Secretary of State to establish Strategic Planning Boards (SPBs) combining two or more principal authorities | Provides the machinery for planning across geographies larger than individual counties/ unitaries |
| s12D | SDS must contain policies of strategic importance; may deal with strategic infrastructure and the amount/distribution of housing, including affordable housing | The SDS can determine some of the difficult “how much and broadly where?” questions |
| s12D(12) | SDS cannot identify specific sites, but can identify more generic areas suitable for or having capacity for development/ infrastructure | The local plan tier remains key for site allocations |
| ss12H–12I | Statutory consultation and independent public examination | The SDS is a development plan tier – it has teeth and must jump through hoops |
| s12L | Once adopted the SDS forms part of the development plan | Local plans must be in general conformity with it and it feeds directly into s38(6) decision-taking |
Strategic Planning Authority – Mind the Gap?
The statutory SPA is:
- any Combined Authority (CA) or Combined County Authority (CCA);
- otherwise, the upper-tier county council in a two-tier area;
- otherwise, the unitary authority; or
- a Strategic Planning Board (where two or more of those authorities are grouped together).
This means that every area should have an SPA once the new Part 1A is in force – Districts/ Boroughs that are not subject to reorganisation would simply end up with the County Council as the SPA.
The wider question is then which of these upper tier SPAs should themselves be directed to plan together via an SPB.
- An SPB is established under regulations made by the Secretary of State. The statutory threshold is fairly broad: the SoS must simply consider it “desirable” for an SDS to cover the combined area (subject to having first carried out a statutory consultation).
- The Government has made clear (in its February 2026 consultation on areas for SDSs) that:
- Its ambition is national coverage.The SPBs should follow existing and emerging devolution footprints where possible and otherwise to be drawn around “sensible geographies”.
- There are 9 non-devolution driven ‘SDS areas’ requiring SPBs and 11 ‘TBC’ (see Annex A&B).
The identification of these areas is key.
