Should the next prime minister stick with the £725bn 10-year infrastructure plan?

The chamber's answer to Whitehall's next occupant was clear enough: stick with the plan, don't tear it up and start again. Nearly three in four voters here backed keeping the 10-year infrastructure strategy intact, a verdict that reads less like enthusiasm for any particular scheme than a vote against the churn and delay that industry bodies have been warning about.

But look closer and the consensus thins with age. Voters in their twenties, thirties and forties backed continuity almost to a person, while the over-55s split far more evenly, and the over-65s were genuinely torn, dividing straight down the middle. Men were considerably more convinced than women, backing the plan by well over four to one against a narrower two-to-one margin among women.

That generational pattern echoes a familiar fault line in British infrastructure politics: younger voters, who will live longest with net zero targets and creaking energy grids, tend to prize long-term certainty over short-term flexibility, while older voters, more sceptical of grand multi-decade commitments from politicians who won't be around to deliver them, hold back. It is the same tension that has dogged HS2 and the county's onshore wind debates for a decade.

If the next prime minister is looking for a mandate to hold the course, this vote offers one, though a noticeably shakier one among the people who have seen infrastructure promises come and go before.