If you work on schemes of any size, the question of who decides is about to change in a lot of England.
On 23 August 2026 the Prime Minister’s Office announced that mayors across England will be given “call in” powers over the most important planning decisions in their areas (GOV.UK press release). The detail landed the following day: MHCLG’s consultation, Planning powers for mayors in England, opened on 24 August 2026 and runs for six weeks, closing at 23:59 on 5 October 2026.
The thresholds
This is the first time national thresholds for strategic call-in have been set outside London. Under the announcement, applications in scope are:
- more than 150 homes
- more than 15,000 m² of commercial floorspace
- any building over 30 metres tall — roughly ten storeys
A mayor will be able to take over a qualifying application and direct the council to approve or refuse it. Councils will continue to determine the large majority of applications, every decision must still follow planning law, the development plan and national policy, applicants keep their right of appeal, and ministers retain a backstop power to intervene.
Worth noting for anyone modelling risk on a marginal site: the consultation observes that the 150-dwelling and 15,000 m² categories would align with the thresholds for the Secretary of State’s new and proposed consultation directions where an authority proposes to refuse. In other words, the same scale of scheme is picking up attention from two directions at once.
The part that changes when your evidence is due
The consultation has four parts — call-in of applications of potential strategic importance, Mayoral Development Orders (MDOs), Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy (MCIL), and some further changes to Local Development Orders.
The MDO section is the one worth reading if you produce technical evidence. An MDO is an upfront grant of planning permission by a mayor for development on a particular site — no planning application needed. The powers sit at sections 61DA to 61DE of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, originally introduced for the Mayor of London by the Infrastructure Act 2015 and updated by the English Devolution Act.
The proposed process is modelled on Local Development Orders: a draft order plus a statement of reasons, a minimum 30-day publicity and consultation period, notification of owners, occupiers and the local planning authority, and a duty on the mayor to consider representations before adopting the order.
The consultation is explicit that key planning matters have to be settled early. It says it will be important to ensure that environmental mitigations and the likely infrastructure requirements to be secured through planning obligations are considered early in the process, along with the mechanism for discharging any subsequent conditions and who the approving authority for those will be.
Translated into working terms: on an MDO site, the drainage strategy, the overheating position, the nutrient or water position and the energy standard don’t sit behind a pre-commencement condition to be argued about later. They inform whether the order gets made at all, and the consenting framework it sets. That’s the front-loading everyone has been talking about since the NPPF restructure, made concrete.
Timing
The government says it wants the call-in and MDO powers in place by early next year, and — subject to consultation and parliamentary scheduling — intends to lay the MDO secondary legislation by the end of 2026. MCIL outside London depends on a Spatial Development Strategy being in place in the relevant area, and would fund a broader range of strategic infrastructure than the London model, which is limited to strategic transport.
Two limitations are proposed on MDO scope, including an exclusion for minerals development.
What to do about it
If you regularly work on schemes at or above 150 homes, this is worth twenty minutes. The thresholds, the MDO procedure and the question of who discharges conditions under an order are all live questions in the consultation, and the answers will shape how early your technical evidence has to be finished.
Responses close at 23:59 on 5 October 2026 via the consultation page on GOV.UK. If your view is that upfront consenting only works when the drainage, overheating and water evidence is genuinely resolved at order stage, that’s exactly the kind of practitioner feedback Part 2 is asking for — so say it.
Sources: GOV.UK — Planning powers for mayors in England (consultation) · GOV.UK — Mayors given powers to green light developments, 23 August 2026 · MHCLG in the Media, 26 August 2026