How London Got Here: The Long Road to a City at War With Itself Over Power and Planning

London's governance is cracking under pressure that has been building for the better part of ten years. The immediate flashpoint is the Starmer government's Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which proposes to strip borough councils of certain planning override powers and hand greater authority to City Hall — a structural shift that would be the most significant redrawing of London's internal power map since the Greater London Authority Act of 1999 created the mayoralty itself.

The reason this matters right now is timing. Sadiq Khan enters the final stretch of his third mayoral term with an approval rating that polling from YouGov in May put at 41 percent — lower than at any point in his second term. The Conservatives, who control eleven of London's thirty-two boroughs, have spent the spring filing formal objections to the Bill's devolution clauses. Meanwhile, Labour-run councils including Lambeth and Lewisham have issued their own qualified reservations, worried that concentrating planning power in the GLA's hands on the South Bank and along the Thames Estuary corridor could override locally agreed neighbourhood plans that took years to produce.

A Decade of Decisions That Weren't Made

The roots of this confrontation run back to 2016, when the then-Cameron government shelved a proposed review of the London Finance Commission's recommendations on fiscal devolution. That review would have given the Mayor's office more direct tax-raising powers — a change that, had it happened, might have reduced the relentless pressure on borough budgets that has defined the decade since. Instead, thirty-two councils were left managing an ever-widening gap between central government grant funding and the cost of statutory services, particularly adult social care and housing support.

By 2023, Transport for London was still operating under a funding settlement first secured in emergency negotiations during the pandemic, with a deal struck that committed TfL to raising fares above inflation through 2025. That commitment fed directly into the cost-of-living politics that have made housing and transport the twin fault lines of every local election in the capital since. The average private rent in inner London crossed £2,800 per month in early 2026, according to Rightmove's quarterly tracker — a figure that frames almost every debate happening inside City Hall and the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government simultaneously.

The Silvertown Tunnel, which opened in east London in 2025 after years of legal challenges led by the London Borough of Greenwich and environmental groups, became a symbol of exactly this governance dysfunction. The project cost £2.2 billion, took twelve years from approval to opening, and satisfied almost nobody — too slow for the developers who needed the Thames crossing, too road-focused for the climate campaigners who wanted a cycling and pedestrian bridge, and too expensive for toll users who now pay up to £4 per crossing during peak hours. It stands in Newham as a monument to what happens when multiple layers of authority — the GLA, affected boroughs, the Treasury, and Highways England — each hold a partial veto.

What Comes Next at City Hall

The Planning and Infrastructure Bill returns to the House of Commons for its report stage in September, and that timetable is now driving everything in London politics. Borough leaders from across the political spectrum have been meeting at the London Councils offices on Great Smith Street in Westminster to coordinate a joint submission to the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee, due by 31 July.

The practical stakes are concentrated in a handful of specific places. The Euston development zone, the Lower Lea Valley sites still awaiting post-Olympic activation, and the Thameside West project near Canary Wharf are all caught between borough plans and GLA strategic designations. Each one is a test case for who, in the end, actually runs London.

For residents trying to understand what this means for their neighbourhood, the short answer is: watch the September committee hearings. If the Bill passes without significant amendment, expect faster decisions on large-scale sites but less local input on what gets built beside the high street. If the boroughs win concessions, the delays that have defined London development politics for a generation will likely continue — just under new paperwork.