Verdicts

The verdict

A chamber that broke decisively for new drilling suggests Labour's incoming energy pivot away from its own manifesto may find less resistance among voters here than in Westminster, with three in four backing new North Sea licences.

The verdict

A narrow verdict for looser tariffs was really a generational one, with the chamber's youngest voters overwhelmingly keen to ease steel duties for builders while its older cohorts, closer perhaps to memories of British Steel's decline, held firm against it.

The verdict

The chamber's instinct was less about Ukraine than about foresight itself: four in five voters here backed a formal long-term UK strategy for a post-conflict Russia, treating strategic patience as good statecraft rather than premature guesswork.

The verdict

The chamber backed keeping the forges running for Kyiv by two to one, but that headline number papers over a gender split so stark it reframes the whole vote: men here backed British-made barrels for Ukraine by three to one, while women broke decisively against, on a question ostensibly about industrial capacity rather than the war itself.

The verdict

The verdict split less by ideology than by life stage: it was the farming generation in its prime — voters in their late twenties through mid-fifties — who backed the fund most decisively, while the very young and the over-65s were the only cohorts to tip into scepticism, as the £30m Farmer Collaboration Fund passed by roughly two to one.

The verdict

On a question that might once have split Britain along its familiar Brexit-era lines over Russia, the chamber instead converged hard, backing joint UK-EU cyber sanctions on Moscow's state and criminal networks by four to one — a rare foreign-policy consensus in a country not known for them.

The verdict

Six years on from full withdrawal, the chamber's clearest fault line wasn't young against old but a single cohort standing apart from every other age group: voters in their late fifties and early sixties dug in hardest against closer ties, even as the vote overall swung decisively — two to one — behind a Brexit "reset".

The verdict

The closest of margins on the most consequential of questions: Lauren Edwards' assisted suicide bill fell narrowly here, with No edging it by six points, but the real story is that neither age nor conviction lined up as expected. The 55-64s were the bill's fiercest opponents, while the youngest working-age voters and the over-65s both tilted towards Yes — a U-shaped pattern that cuts against the usual assumption that it is the old who fear this legislation most and the young who back it.

The verdict

Shifting the tax burden from work to wealth found a comfortable majority here, with three in five backing a levy on fortunes above £10 million and a lighter tax on income — though the 55-64s, the cohort closest to retirement and often sitting on accumulated property or pension wealth, were the one group to recoil from it.

The verdict

A question about mandates produced no mandate at all: the chamber split exactly down the middle, 72 votes apiece, on whether Andy Burnham should go to the country before governing further.

The verdict

Voters here declined to treat a mid-term change of prime minister as grounds for a fresh mandate, with No winning by ten points, even as the closeness of the vote showed real unease about a Downing Street handover nobody put on a ballot.

The verdict

When the last blast furnaces making virgin steel in Britain looked set to go cold, this chamber reached for the state without much hesitation, backing the Scunthorpe takeover by better than six to one and leaving Jingye's compensation complaint largely unmourned.

The verdict

Nearly three to one, the chamber came down against MPs moonlighting, a verdict striking mainly for how little it divided by age, gender or anything else — this was as close to consensus as a self-selecting sample gets.

The verdict

The chamber backed the softer, root-causes route to welfare reform — 63 to 45, a clear if not landslide preference for mending jobs, health and housing over cutting benefit rates outright.

The verdict

The chamber came down decisively for scrapping the scheme, though the one age band split clean down the middle was the 25-34s, the very cohort most fluent in digital services and most exposed to how they might be policed.

The verdict

On a question that touches Britain's rawest instincts about punishment, this chamber came down decisively for expansion, with two in three voters backing whole-life orders for a broader range of violent and sexual crimes, though the generation that will spend longest inside the system it's judging proved the most reluctant to harden it.

The verdict

On a question that barely needed asking, the chamber answered anyway, and near enough three in four said no, most politicians are not honest.

The verdict

The chamber backed loosening judicial review's grip on housebuilding and infrastructure by two to one, but the enthusiasm belonged almost entirely to the working-age middle — a generation used to blaming planning delay for Britain's stalled growth, not to the young or the old.

The verdict

A vote this tight on a question this practical suggests Britain's instinct on AI in policing isn't ideological but conditional, and the chamber split almost exactly down the middle, with Yes edging it by the barest of margins, on whether machines can be trusted with the mountains of digital evidence now clogging the justice system.

The verdict

Bulgaria's voters here came down decisively for hosting the US tankers at Bezmer, but the two-to-one verdict masks a real fracture over how comfortable this country is playing forward base for someone else's war — not everyone in the chamber saw sovereignty and NATO utility as pointing the same way.

The verdict

A chamber this evenly split on a question about tiers and packages ended up, fittingly, without much consensus at all — yes crept home by six points, on a coalition that thickened with age rather than settled ideology.

The verdict

What looks like a chamber impatient with hereditary privilege turned out, on closer inspection, to be something more particular: two in three backing the scrapping of the Lords for a business-and-academic alternative, with the loudest enthusiasm coming not from the young insurgents you'd expect but from the over-65s, nine in ten of whom wanted it gone.

The verdict

Rare is the constitutional question that unites a chamber almost regardless of who's asked, but this one did: the defections of Reform's new MPs from their 2024 tickets have produced a verdict, four to one, that switching parties should cost you your seat until voters say otherwise.

The verdict

A pledge built to protect pensioners from politics fell narrowly to the very generation approaching retirement, with the triple lock's guarantee against inflation and wage stagnation losing by a slim six points as the near-retired and working-age middle turned against it.