Should Andy Burnham give more powers to local government to spread economic growth?

Yes carried the day, 15 votes to 12, a 12-point margin that counts as a win but not a mandate — of the kind that leaves a policy launched rather than settled. Andy Burnham gets his growth speech and, on this evidence, a chamber roughly six-in-ten men behind him and a plurality of women against.

That gender gap is the story here. Men voted yes by 63% to 37%, women voted no by 71% to 29% — a reversal stark enough to suggest this was read less as a technical question about Whitehall's grip on regional spending than as a proxy vote on Burnham himself, and perhaps on the wider psychodrama of a new Labour leader stepping into Number 10's vacuum mid-week.

Age told a messier story. The 25-34s and 35-44s leaned yes (60% and 67%), as did the 55-64s (67%), while the two voters aged 45-54 both said no and the lone 16-24 voter dissented too — not enough numbers to call a generational trend, but enough to show this wasn't simply younger metropolitan voters against an older shire-and-Westminster bloc, the fault line devolution debates usually draw.

If the "levelling up" era taught anything, it is that voters like the principle of moving power out of London more than they trust any particular politician to do it — and that ambivalence, not consensus, is what actually carried this vote.