The government is set to give mayors across 13 combined authority areas in England new powers to override local councils on major planning decisions, accelerating progress toward Labour's target of 1.5 million new homes by the end of the decade.
The powers will apply to developments of more than 150 homes, commercial schemes exceeding 15,000 square metres, or buildings taller than 30 metres. Mayors in areas including Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, the West Midlands and West of England will gain call-in powers similar to those already available to London's mayor. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook has cited London's existing call-in system as evidence the approach can unblock stalled strategic sites.
The move has drawn criticism from the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Greens, who argue it reduces local democratic accountability. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough's Conservative mayor, Paul Bristow, took a different position, saying the new powers would let him approve schemes that have been held up immediately.
For insurers underwriting construction risk, the relevant question is not whether more homes get built, but whether a faster pipeline compounds the defect claims pressure already driving market withdrawal.
Insurance Business UK reported earlier this year that several insurers have already stopped writing construction risks altogether, while others have raised deductibles to as high as £150,000 - a shift driven in large part by a marked increase in defective workmanship claims, with tight profit margins and more aggressive contractor behaviour in a competitive build environment cited as the primary causes.
More approvals moving through planning does not, by itself, produce more skilled labour, more thorough site inspection, or more conservative contractor behaviour. The conditions that have already pushed construction insurers toward higher deductibles and, in some cases, market exit are structural rather than volumetric - and accelerating build volume without addressing those underlying conditions tends to show up later as elevated claims frequency in structural warranty and latent defects lines.
The timing of the planning reform interacts directly with how liability in this class now works.
The Building Safety Act 2022 extended the limitation period for future claims under the Defective Premises Act from six years to 15 years from practical completion, effective from June 28, 2022. The Act also requires developers to provide a new build home warranty of at least 15 years - an extension from the 10-year Buildmark cover that NHBC has traditionally provided as the dominant scheme across most of the market. Any defects arising from developments now moving through an accelerated planning pipeline carry a longer tail of potential liability than would have applied to schemes built even a few years ago.
That extended tail matters because the underwriting decision in construction and latent defects cover depends heavily on inspection quality rather than the insurer's own site visibility. An ongoing dispute involving AmTrust Europe and MD Insurance Services - in which AmTrust alleges a wholesale failure by MD's inspection subsidiaries to properly assess construction risk before AmTrust underwrote latent defects policies on developments that later showed serious structural defects - illustrates how much exposure in this class ultimately rests on the reliability of third-party inspection, and how long after the original underwriting decision the consequences can surface.
For brokers advising housebuilders, developers and the local authorities and planning consultants now likely to find themselves in a more active and more contested planning environment, the mayoral call-in reform raises two specific questions worth addressing ahead of any acceleration in build volumes.
The first is whether structural warranty and latent defects cover for development clients reflects the 15-year liability window - both the limitation period that has applied since June 2022 and the mandatory warranty term now required under the Building Safety Act - rather than older 10-year terms that may no longer align with statutory exposure. The second is whether professional indemnity arrangements for architects, planning consultants and local authority planning officers adequately anticipate a planning environment where call-in powers are explicitly designed to override local decisions. More schemes overridden at mayoral level means more judicial review challenges and more legal dispute around major developments - and PI wordings written before call-in powers became routinely used in a wider range of regions may not fully price that risk.
Government planning reform is designed to add volume and speed. The construction insurance market is already moving toward caution and selectivity in response to rising defect costs. Whether faster planning approval translates into more homes built - or simply into more schemes entering a construction pipeline that the market underwriting them is already treating with real scepticism - is a question that will only be answered once this cohort of accelerated developments reaches the stage, several years post-completion, when latent defects typically start to emerge.
