Should the government reverse the freeze on student loan repayment thresholds?

The vote reads less like a debate about fiscal arithmetic than a verdict on trust: two in three voters backed reversing the threshold freeze, effectively siding with the select committee's charge that students were mis-sold their loans on terms that then moved. That the youngest cohorts, those with most to lose, voted yes almost as readily as those in their forties and fifties suggests this landed as a fairness question rather than a generational grievance.

The one clear dissent came from the over-65s, a small group but a strikingly one-sided one, three of four voting to keep the freeze — the only bloc in the entire sample not persuaded. Men and women split in similar proportions to the overall result, with no real gender gulf to speak of; this was an age story, not a sex one, and even there the fracture sat only at the very top of the age range.

The result taps into a wider vein of unease that has followed student finance since 2012 — the sense among borrowers that the goalposts move after the whistle, echoed in the government's own struggles to justify plan 2 changes to the OBR and the courts. A committee accusing ministers of a "moral obligation" found an unusually receptive echo chamber here.

If ministers were hoping public patience with retrospective changes to loan terms had worn thin, this chamber suggests otherwise, at least for anyone still young enough to be paying them off.