Should the UK build flexibility into all future long-term public transport contracts?

It takes an odd case study to unite Britain's under-25s with its pensioners, but a comparison of two Colombian bus systems has managed it: voters here backed building flexibility into long-term transport contracts by three to one, and the yes camp held up from teenagers to the over-65s alike. The one bloc to dig in against it, mildly, sat in the middle of working life.

The real fracture was gender, not generation. Women voted almost as one, all but a single dissenter across fourteen votes, while men split more like two to one, with nine of twenty-six unpersuaded that Whitehall needs more room to renegotiate deals once they are signed. The 55-64s, meanwhile, produced the only unanimous bloc in the vote, eight yes and not one no.

The instinct being tested here is an old one in British infrastructure politics: whether rigid, fixed-price contracts protect the public purse or simply guarantee that the next shock, a pandemic, a fuel spike, a franchise collapse, becomes someone else's insoluble mess. From PFI hospitals to rail franchising's serial failures, the country has plenty of its own Bucaramangas to weigh against its Bogotás.

If there is a verdict here, it is that flexibility now reads as prudence rather than risk, at least to most of those who bothered to vote on it.