Member

We have already seen examples where mayoral authority has been used to push through high-risk strategies at speed, where scrutiny was treated as an afterthought and where auditors struggled to get traction until the damage was already done. Strong mayors—the Committee knows that I approve of them—without strong audit are not a model for devolution. They are a recipe for repeating past failures under a different constitutional label. If we are to devolve power at scale, we must also hardwire early challenge, forward-looking auditing, transparency and real institutional strength into the system. We do not believe it is there at present.