Should the UK change GDP growth as the main economic target in favour of a no-growth model focused on wellbeing and sust?

Nothing here was decided so much as suspended: on whether GDP growth should give way to a post-growth, wellbeing-led economic model, the chamber split 52 to 53, a margin of a single vote across 105 ballots. That is not consensus withheld by a whisker; it is a genuine fracture, with no majority anywhere close.

The generational pattern is the tell. The youngest voters, in their teens, twenties and early thirties, backed the shift by wide margins, while the 35-44s dug in hard against it, and the older cohorts drifted back toward roughly even. That reads less like a simple young-versus-old culture clash than a life-stage one: those furthest from mortgages, childcare bills and career-peak earnings can afford to entertain "sufficiency" as an ideal, while those in the thick of provisioning for a family recoiled from anything that sounds like slower growth.

The fault line underneath is the one CUSP and its allies have been pressing for years against Treasury orthodoxy: whether GDP, the metric that has organised British economic policy since the war, still captures what matters when net zero, inequality and stagnant productivity dominate the conversation. This vote suggests that argument has won converts without yet winning the country, even in miniature.

What tipped sentiment on each side was less data than instinct. The strongest Yes case invoked the gap between decades of growth and lived experience, arguing that GDP per capita, the Happy Planet Index and kindred measures "are much better indicators" of whether lives are actually improving. The most-respected No voice offered the classical rebuttal in four words flat: "When GDP grows, everybody benefits."

A dead heat on the question of whether growth itself should remain the point suggests the argument is not going away, only pausing for breath.