Katie Lam is the Shadow Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and the MP for Weald of Kent.

For somebody who talks so much about devolution, Andy Burnham is remarkably willing to trample over local democracy when people don’t agree with him.

He’s already announced that, in areas which have voted to keep council tax low, he’s going to punish local people with massive funding cuts which will hike up their council tax bills.

And from start to finish, the Government’s plans for local government reorganisation have been a complete farce. Last month, they were forced to withdraw their plans to gerrymander new council boundaries across England – after councils had already spent more than £20 million preparing to transition to new authorities.

But Burnham’s latest attack on local democracy is the most egregious yet. At the end of October, the Government’s new National Scheme of Delegation came into force. In effect, it means that almost all planning decisions will be made by unelected council officials, and not by elected councillors.

It was already the case that, in most cases and in most of the country, council officials were responsible for deciding most routine planning decisions. However, elected councillors had the right to act as a backstop; they retained the ability to ‘call in’ developments that people in their area had concerns about.

Under Labour’s new rules, it’s now legally mandatory for councillors to ‘delegate’ planning decisions which are considered ‘routine’ to officials. If councillors object to a development which is designated as such, they have absolutely no powers to fight it.

And on major developments, delegation of the final decision to officers is now ‘presumed’. If councillors want to be involved at all, they have to submit a formal request – which has to be approved by council officials.

So, having spent months talking about putting power into the hands of local communities, the only change that he’s actually made is to take away one of the few remaining discretionary powers that elected councillors had left.

Councillors already spend most of their time fulfilling obligations set for them by central government. Now, they’ve been reduced to spectators in the planning process too. What’s the point in asking people to turn up and vote, if the people that they choose to represent them can only ever implement the same set of policies? Democracy is, fundamentally, about choice – candidates and parties set out their competing visions for how the country, or a local area, should be run, and each individual gets to decide which of those visions they find more compelling.

But increasingly, at the local level, council candidates are being left without any scope to offer a meaningfully different vision for their local area.

And even on its own terms, these changes will do very little to get Britain building. This new framework will change the people who make the final decisions, but not the rules that they use to inform those decisions. Unelected officials will apply the same vague tests that planning committees did – but, crucially, they cannot be removed if people feel that they’re doing a bad job.

Nor does it address project viability, the single biggest blocker to building. At the moment, it’s just too expensive for builders to build anything, if they hope to turn a profit. A huge chunk of the increased cost over the past few years is directly downstream of rules created by the Government. While each of these rules might have been defensible on its own, complying with them, as a whole, massively pushes up costs for builders. The next Conservative government will scrap many of those rules, and bring down the cost of building a new home by £50,000 – but at the Budget last month, John Healey explicitly ruled out any changes to building regulations.

So instead of getting rid of the rules which are making it too expensive for anybody to build anything, Labour have chosen to strip away one of the few mechanisms left for councillors to offer choice to their residents. They may claim to care about local government – but to the extent that they do, it’s because they see it as an opportunity to create more government, and take more of people’s money in tax, not as a channel for people to make decisions about their local area.

For Burnham and Labour, local government is just another excuse to interfere in people’s lives, and take more of what they earn – and we will fight them every step of the way.