Would giving regional mayors a share of income tax strengthen local economies?

The headline is straightforward enough — yes won, by 91 votes to 70 — but the debate underneath it is not. Not one Yes voter troubled themselves to make the case for fiscal devolution; the argument for growth, transport and housing investment that the government's proposal is built on went entirely unspoken on the page. It won anyway, on the strength of the vote alone rather than the strength of any argument offered.

What the floor did leave behind was a wall of scepticism, and a fairly consistent one. The most-respected line worried about oversight rather than economics: "We have seen large scale corruption by mayors in recent years and total lack of accountability," it read, calling for audits "to be centralised to prevent fraud and corruption until honest people are elected." A close second predicted the money would simply vanish into "virtue signalling tat" before mayors "whine that it's all London's fault," pointing to Scotland as the cautionary precedent. Others were blunter still — "More layers of government, [less] money at the end" — and one reply argued the real fix lay upstream, in reversing the privatisation of the Audit Commission before any cash changes hands.

There was no clash of arguments here so much as a one-sided volley that the chamber still voted past. The No opinions cohere around a single fault line — devolve the money, but who audits the mayor — echoing long-running unease about accountability in England's combined authorities, from Tees Valley to the West Midlands, and the wider question of whether devolution without matching scrutiny just relocates the risk of waste rather than removing it.

The chamber handed power to the mayors while telling them, in effect, that it does not trust them with it — a majority for devolution built entirely on votes cast in silence, over objections nobody rebutted.