Verdicts

The verdict

A fictional Prime Minister's symbolic dash to No10 North was meant to settle the question of where power should sit, but the chamber left it unsettled, splitting close enough that "should the PM work from outside London" carried by only 14 points of 30 votes cast.

The verdict

A clear two-to-one margin for taxing student landlords, but the sharpest No argument barely dented the result: this was a vote decided on who should bear the cost of student living, not on the technicalities of who legally owes it.

The verdict

Two to one against, the chamber decided Burnham's denials are just that — denials, not a plan — even as barely anyone bothered to make the case in writing.

The verdict

A narrow six-to-four verdict, from just ten voters, that the UK should chase parity with Brussels on tariffs — a result too small to call a mood but pointed enough to note where the grievance sits: not the whisky exemption, but the sectors left exposed.

The verdict

A narrow but decisive majority backed reviving capital punishment for the worst crimes, closing a 60-year-old chapter of British justice by an 8-point margin even as the floor's sharpest arguments came from the side that lost.

The verdict

A generational split runs right through this one: the youngest voters here backed Burnham's devolution rush almost unanimously, while everyone over 35 recoiled, leaving the "big bang" rejected by a ten-point margin of the 110 who voted.

The verdict

A modest majority here backed timber over steel and concrete as the fix for Britain's housing shortfall, with yes carrying it by eighteen points even as the middle-aged proved the coalition's soft spot.

The verdict

A single vote settled it: on whether to junk GDP for a wellbeing-and-sufficiency model, the chamber effectively tied itself in knots, 52 to 53, a verdict as close to a shrug as a referendum can produce.

The verdict

The chamber backed new North Sea licences by a wide margin, folding Rosebank and Jackdaw into the cost-of-living argument Andy Burnham has floated — but only after the youngest voters present staged the one visible revolt, near-unanimously against.

The verdict

The finance came narrower than the philosophy: a chamber broadly sympathetic to public ownership still balked, by a slim margin, at the specific mechanism of raiding pension pots to pay for it, with No edging it on 112 votes.

The verdict

Voters here drew a hard line between principle and practice: asked whether a non-citizen should ever qualify for state support, the chamber's answer was a clear no, with only four in ten backing any entitlement — but the age pattern beneath that verdict refuses to fit the usual "young open, old closed" script.

The verdict

Manufacturing policy rarely produces consensus across a chamber this broad, yet here the verdict was emphatic: voters backed the Makers' Manifesto by better than two to one, with support holding firm across every age band from apprentices to pensioners.

The verdict

Age did most of the talking here: the youngest voters backed scrapping digital ID almost as one, while the over-65s were the only group to reject it, leaving Burnham's redirection of £1.8 billion toward living costs endorsed two-to-one overall but far from settled across generations.

The verdict

The chamber that will actually need care backed it hardest: voters over 65 supported a National Care Service on NHS principles by nine to one, as the floor overall endorsed Andy Burnham's plan two to one, leaving the funding question conspicuously unresolved.

The verdict

Voters here took a dim view of the annual patch-and-pray cycle, backing full resurfacing after three repeat fixes by four to one, a verdict that treats council thrift as false economy rather than prudence.

The verdict

On a question about handing algorithmic judgement any role in animal welfare oversight, the chamber recoiled decisively, with three in four rejecting generative AI's involvement in licensing decisions that campaigners and scientists alike treat as ethically load-bearing.

The verdict

Retention, not sentiment, was the subtext here: a chamber otherwise split down the middle by gender closed ranks two to one behind extending wraparound childcare for service families, treating it less as a welfare perk than as the price of keeping people in uniform.

The verdict

The chamber decided the licence fee has outlived its argument, backing a switch to subscription by a clear three-to-two margin even as the strongest voice against it made the case that a smaller, meaner BBC would be the price of that convenience.

The verdict

Reviving a punishment Britain formally buried in 1998, the chamber narrowly backed execution for child sex offenders — 55 to 52 of 107 votes — with women considerably more wary of the remedy than men.

The verdict

The chamber gave Andy Burnham's Manchester experiment a narrow but clear rebuff, with No prevailing by eight points on a question that was less about geography than about whether devolution built from Downing Street is devolution at all.

The verdict

The chamber's clearest fault line here wasn't age but gender, with men backing the MoD's plan to iron out childcare disparities across the union while women split the other way, a reminder that reimbursement schemes often look tidier on the balance sheet than they do to the people actually managing the childcare.

The verdict

A single vote separated the two sides, and beneath that near-perfect tie sits a chamber cracked clean along generational and gender lines: fracking's fate here came down to a coin toss, with yes edging it by one vote of 111 cast.

The verdict

Scepticism ran deep across the chamber on Labour's flagship housebuilding pledge, with roughly three in four voters here dismissing the 1.5 million target as unrealistic even as annual completions sit at their lowest since 2015/16.

The verdict

A blunt proposal to switch off the whole benefits system and start again fell narrowly short, with No prevailing by ten points, but the chamber's arithmetic scrambled the usual generational script: it was the 35-44s, not the young or the pensioners, who backed suspension most emphatically, while every other age band pulled the other way. That inversion is the real finding here. Voters in their thirties and early forties — often the group squeezed hardest by tax and childcare costs while feeling furthest from needing state support themselves — swung decisively for a reset, whereas the youngest cohort and the 45-54s, closer to the sharp end of PIP delays or caring responsibilities, resisted it hardest. Men edged narrowly toward suspension, women leaned away, but neither gap approached the scale of that age anomaly, suggesting this was less a simple left-right split than a divide between those who feel they're subsidising a system and those who fear becoming its casualty. The vote lands squarely on the fault line opposition figures have been working since the pandemic-era claims surge — fraud, face-to-face assessments, work conditionality — against a government wary of the "administrative errors and hardship" its own reassessment drive keeps generating. That the chamber split so close to even, on a policy as drastic as suspending all payments outright, shows how far the argument for a harder reset has travelled into mainstream welfare debate, even where it doesn't quite win. The floor's two most-respected voices captured the poles precisely. The Yes case argued baldly that "apart from the most extreme cases of disability, benefits are just encouraging a society of dependant losers," while the top-rated No response dismissed the fraud premise itself, telling Yes voters "the world is not replete with people fulfilling your bizarre conspiratorial fantasy of co-ordinated fraud." A near-even split on stopping every payment in the country tells you the argument isn't about to go away, whichever side of forty you happen to be on.