Will the Local Elections have any impact at all on Urban Expansion?

Probably not.

In the past changes in control has led to big delays in local plans and swings between allocating greenfield sites or not – one thinks of Coventry, Doncaster and Northumberland.

There are very few cases of this this time.  Certainly in a few cases things will get more interesting – like Wirral being NOC.  But even in Brighton where the Greens regain control they have given up opposition to urban expansion (as long as it is 100% affordable).  The bland lib-dems manifesto for Chelmsford mentions nothing about North Essex Garden Communities.

UKIP only fielded three candidates in Thanet which they won in 2015 but it will have no impact on the local plan.  Wirral goes to NOC and it was the bone headed stubbornness of the labour leader there which led it to be bottom of the local plan failure tables.

I spotted no changes of control in the whole CaMKox corridor.

Conclusion – urban expansion seems to have had no impact at the ballot box.  The political rising of housing as an issue has seen to that, and local politicians are far less jittery on this than they were 5 years ago.