Should the House of Lords introduce a retirement age of 80 and require peers to attend at least 20% of sitting days?

For a proposal aimed squarely at the House of Lords' oldest habits, the chamber delivered a verdict — 60 to 17 — that reads less like generational impatience than a straightforward appetite for reform, dressed up as a rout.

The real fracture wasn't age but gender. Men backed an 80-year retirement age and a hard attendance floor by nine to one, while women split almost evenly, six in favour to seven against — a divide that suggests scepticism less about the policy's substance than about whether crude thresholds are the right tool for fixing an unelected chamber's legitimacy problem. Age, meanwhile, produced no clean fracture at all: the 35-44s and over-65s were unanimous for change, but the youngest cohort of 16-24s split down the middle, hardly the instinctive youth revolt against gerontocracy one might expect.

The result sits inside a longer argument about what to do with an unelected second chamber that keeps growing while resisting the kind of compulsory exit rules Commons life imposes via elections — Labour's manifesto pledge, and the committee work behind it, clearly found more sympathy here than any defence of the status quo.

If the Lords itself divides anything like this chamber did, reform may hinge less on age than on persuading its women members that thresholds, not just retirement, are the right fix.