Should the government relax planning rules to build 300,000 homes a year in England?

The chamber backed relaxing planning rules to chase 300,000 homes a year by a wide margin, but the aggregate hides a much sharper story underneath it: this was a vote split by proximity to the housing ladder rather than by any national consensus on planning reform. Voters in their twenties, thirties and forties backed the change comfortably, at times almost unanimously, while the over-55s did something rarer on this platform — they dug in hard against it.

The 55-64 bracket was the one clear redoubt of resistance, voting nine to two against, a reversal so stark against every other age group that it reads less like scepticism about housing supply and more like the classic homeowner-versus-renter split that has shadowed planning politics for a decade. Men backed the reform more readily than women, who came close to an even split, suggesting the usual gender gap on development questions held here too, if narrower than it might have been.

The result echoes the wider fight already playing out over grey belt land and the revised National Planning Policy Framework: younger voters, further from owning and more exposed to the housing shortage, want supply loosened; older voters, more likely to already own and to feel the pinch of nearby development, want the brakes kept on.

It is the same coalition, in miniature, that the government is betting its housing target on — and the same one liable to make it politically expensive.