Andy Burnham has ruled out reforming the Barnett formula if he becomes prime minister. His spokesperson confirmed that any future government he leads would not change the current funding arrangements for Wales and Scotland. Burnham previously suggested in a book that the arrangements should be torn up.
The Barnett formula survived its brush with the ballot, 12 votes to 7, a 26-point margin that reads as a solid but not crushing defence of the union's fiscal plumbing. With only 19 profiled voters, this is a chamber verdict rather than a national one, but the shape of it is consistent rather than freakish.
The clearest fracture was by numbers rather than demographics: the 25-34 bracket, the largest single group at 11 votes, broke hard for No, 7 to 4. Everywhere else the sample thins to a handful — one or two voters apiece from 35 upwards — so little can be read into the older cohorts beyond the fact that none of them backed change.
Gender told a milder story. Men split 7-4 against reform, women divided evenly at 3-3, suggesting whatever appetite exists for tearing up the formula sits more with women than men, though six voters is too few to lean on hard. Either way, the vote lands close to the wider devolution fault line Burnham himself straddled — floating reform in print, then quietly ruling it out as a prospective PM, and finding the platform's voters no keener than his own spokesperson to touch it.
For a formula that has outlived governments of every stripe since 1978, another vote to leave it alone barely counts as news — the surprise would have been otherwise.
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