There was no real fracture here, and that itself is the story: a chamber otherwise prone to splitting on almost anything closed ranks, four to one, behind faster courts and tighter timetables for housing and infrastructure, suggesting patience with legal challenge as a check on development has worn thin even among voters who might once have reached for judicial review as a shield.
The one soft spot was among 55-to-64-year-olds, who still backed the change but by a much narrower margin than everyone else, a generation old enough to remember both nimby battles won through the courts and the frustration of watching projects stall for years, and evidently torn between those two instincts. Women in the chamber were similarly less convinced, splitting closer to even while men lined up decisively behind reform, a gap that echoes wider debates over whether "streamlining" planning law quietly narrows who gets heard.
The result sits squarely on the fault line running through British planning policy since at least the Growth and Infrastructure Act: the tension between due process as a democratic safeguard and due process as a brake on the houses, pylons and railways ministers say the country needs. Voters here came down hard on the side of speed.
If judicial review has any defenders left in this sample, they were a small and mostly female minority, easily outvoted by a chamber that wants shovels in the ground.
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