Should the UK pursue growth in every postcode through greater local community power?

The most striking thing about this result is not that it passed, decisively, but who held out. Across almost every age band the verdict was emphatic — the youngest voters, the retired, the middle-aged all broke hard for devolving power to chase growth locally — except for one bloc sitting almost exactly on the fence: the 55-64s split down the middle, the only age group to do so, a pocket of scepticism amid an otherwise lopsided chamber.

The sharper fracture, though, ran along gender lines. Men backed the postcode-growth agenda comfortably, while women tipped the other way, splitting against it. That divide reads less like a dispute over devolution itself than over trust in the mechanism — whether handing power and money to local partnerships translates into tangible help, or simply adds another layer between promise and delivery.

The result sits squarely on the fault line that has run through UK regional policy since the "levelling up" era: does empowering mayors, first ministers and local partnerships actually narrow the gap between prosperous and left-behind places, or does devolution become a byword for cost-shifting and diffused accountability, especially when paired with fresh spending like the VAT cut on electricity bills. Burnham's pitch to Edinburgh and Cardiff for "genuine partnership" was, in that sense, being tested against exactly this scepticism.

What swayed the floor split along familiar lines of ambition versus fiscal anxiety. The chamber's top Yes voice argued plainly that the "UK needs to pursue growth through every possible way," while the most-respected No voice warned it "will mean more borrowing to add to the trillions we already owe" and predicted government would "of course" find "obscure taxes" to cover it come autumn.

A chamber happy to back growth-through-devolution in principle, but with women and the near-60s already asking who ends up paying for it.