Deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has promised the ‘most ambitious programme of devolution this country has ever seen’, with new powers for local councils and more directly-elected mayors. But this will not apply, it seems, when it comes to planning. On the contrary, the centrepiece of the King’s speech today will be planning reforms aimed at reducing the powers of local communities to block housing and infrastructure developments. Powers will be centralised, with central government taking it upon itself to rule on more housing and infrastructure projects deemed to be in the national interest – just as Energy Secretary Ed Miliband did last week when he approved three large solar farms in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Lincolnshire.

It is easy to see the political attraction of taking on Nimbys

So much for ‘devolution’. One of the solar projects, Sunnica, near Newmarket, was not only opposed by local councils, it had also been recommended for rejection by the Planning Inspectorate, the government’s Bristol-based national planning quango.

On housebuilding, the government intends to change the system so that local residents might have a say in the style of housing which gets built but not whether it gets built at all. That is all very well but rather ignores the reality: that it isn’t so much Nimbys who are currently blocking houses getting built as environmental legislation. The EU-era laws on nitrate neutrality – which demand that developers proves their housing estates will do nothing to increase nitrate levels in local watercourses – has been blamed for blocking numerous developments. Labour actually opposed the Conservative government when it proposed last year to relax the rules a little in order to get an extra 100,000 houses built over the next decade.

Another block on new housing is constraints in the electricity grid – in parts of West London, the Greater London Authority has warned that it might not be possible to build new homes for another decade because energy-hungry data centres are taking too much capacity on the local electricity distribution network. That is a problem which is not going to be eased by Labour’s net zero drive, which will increase the energy consumption of homes by pushing us towards heat pumps and electric cars.

Data centres, by the way, are another example of nationally-important infrastructure which the government says it wants its planning bill to speed up.

As for the ‘Nimbys’ who have supposedly blocked new housing I have yet to see any great sign of them possessing huge powers. Around my way in Cambridgeshire, there have been proposed developments which attracted dozens of letters of objection – but which went ahead anyway. When Nimbys do score a success it tends to be because they have latched on to some environmental rule – for example by finding a rare species that is under threat. But is Labour really planning to weaken the laws concerning animal habitats?

It is easy to see the political attraction of taking on Nimbys – they are presumed to be Tory-voters who are standing in the way of decent housing for young, Labour-voting masses. That, though, is a gross simplification. A lot of the Nimbys I meet seem to have turned Lib Dem – it is that party which now holds the green belt seats around Cambridge, Oxford and West London.

Labour can’t have it both ways. It can’t claim to be boosting local democracy while at the same time taking away the – very limited – powers which local people have to decide where homes should be built. Nor can the government increase housebuilding by taking on Nimbys alone – it would have to ditch or revise reams of environmental laws, too.

Don’t expect Starmer’s planning revolution to get much further than the Conservatives’ various initiatives over the past decade.