Andy Burnham is expected to become prime minister and has signalled greater public control over energy and water companies. Thames Water serves 16 million households and businesses and owes £19.8 billion in infrastructure investment. Its main creditors have been negotiating with Ofwat since June last year while UK national debt stands at 95% of GDP.
A clear win for public control, 65% to 35%, on 23 votes with profiles attached — a comfortable if not overwhelming margin for the kind of interventionist move Burnham has been trailing on utilities.
The sharpest line in the data is not age but gender. Men voted yes by 10 to 3, better than three to one; women split the other way, backing no by 4 to 2. That is a rare instance of a clean gender gulf outrunning any generational one on this platform.
Age, by contrast, barely moved the needle in any consistent direction — the 25-34 bracket was the most enthusiastic (8 yes to 2 no), younger 16-24s split closer to even, and the handful of older voters were too thin to read much into. The pattern echoes the broader debate over nationalisation as a fix for stretched infrastructure and £19.8bn of Thames Water's obligations, where support tends to cut across generations but frequently splits along other lines.
A vote that reads less like a verdict on renationalisation itself than on who in the chamber trusts the state to run the taps.
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