Andy Burnham has come for the headphone-dodgers. But is there any evidence fines work?

UK leaders past and present love to nudge us towards good or bad behaviour. Social scientists, though, say £100 on-the-spot fines may not prove an effective deterrent

It’s a very modern phenomenon, the nuisance of people on public transport using their phones for flagrantly loud things – conference calls, TV shows, music – without headphones. I remember a time when the most annoying thing you could do with a phone was play a game with an irritating beep; a time when having a loud conversation was so verboten that comedians could get whole careers out of it. So why does Andy Burnham’s campaign, “Share the carriage, not the noise,” introducing fines of up to £100 for miscreants, feel so nostalgic? And crucially, will the fines work?

Burnham is on to something, because it is insufferable. I could lose hours debating the finer points of whether it’s worse to listen to an episode of Paw Patrol, a crux point in a Pretty Little Liars plot, some really mid-80s disco or a high-level discussion about marketing strategy. (In fact, there is no hierarchy; they’re all intolerable in their own special ways.)

Prime ministers have tried this kind of thing before. Tony Blair proposed on-the-spot fines for loutish behaviour in 2000, saying he wanted to authorise police to march a drunkard or other ne’er-do-well to a cashpoint and charge them £100, which was considerably more money back then. This didn’t happen, but he did manage to introduce fixed-penalty notices for so-called “yob” offences. It led to some hilarious policing decisions: the Women’s Institute was threatened with fines for flyering, and a man was fined for dropping a tenner. Woe betide you if you lost your cat and tried to find it by sticking its portrait on a lamp-post.

However, unlike Blair, Burnham seems to have put some grownup thinking behind these new proposals. Mainly because there is already the infrastructure to implement such fines. Public transport officials already know how to get money off passengers, and they’re good at it.

Even so, do small behavioural interventions like this give the impression of a competent government firing on all cylinders, or a flailing one, tinkering round the edges? What about perpetrators – are they deterred by fines?

Geoff Mulgan, an academic at University College London, was director of policy at No 10 under Blair. “Sometimes how the little things work - whether it’s litter, potholes or graffiti – is that they affect your sense of order in a profound way. And that’s always ignored by the policy elite, partly because they live in places which aren’t affected,” he says. He refers to the “broken windows theory” developed in the early 80s by American social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling. They wrote: “Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.” This is not because “some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers”, but that the “unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares” and so the psychological barrier to breaking more windows is lowered. The asbos and spot fines of the 00s were contested Blairite policies, says Mulgan, but they also created a “sense of order and neatness”. He says the topics always came up in regeneration meetings. “It’s not for the big-city middle class; they all think it’s totally silly.”

Clive Bates, now a consultant in public health and sustainability, also worked in Blair’s strategy unit, and was famous at the time for floating the so-called “fat tax” in the mid-00s, which was actually a surcharge on unhealthy foods. “Thanks for raising one of the most humiliating episodes of my professional life,” he says, drily. (This was considered an example of a “pigouvian tax” – which I genuinely thought at the time was because they were calling us pigs, but actually it’s named after the English economist Arthur Pigou. It can be imposed on parties that are generating economic activity that has a negative effect on others who are not involved, such as manufacturers whose process pollutes the environment for the whole community.) Anyway, Bates agrees that the re-establishment of what he calls “injunctive norms” – our ideas about what people in general think is right or wrong, which influence our own behaviour – is worthwhile. “It gives people the sense that the world around them isn’t falling apart,” he says.

Behaviourally, taxes and fines operate very differently. Taxes incentivise positive change, while fines penalise the negative in order to signal the expectation of the positive. What that means in practical terms is that a fine is probably not about the money. “I can’t see someone sitting there and working out, ‘It’s a £25 fine with a one in 200 chance of being caught; therefore, my effective chance of being fined for playing this incredibly annoying music is 12p,’” Bates says. “I don’t think any economist thinks we think like that.”

It’s more about the bystander, he says. “I think it puts some spine into people, to see the threat of a fine. I might get annoyed by someone, but I don’t feel empowered to do anything because I don’t know what the rules are. The rules might work against me: this person could just tell me to piss off, and I would have no comeback.” Once you’ve set a norm, the whole world is your police officer.

Chris Perry, a behaviour change consultant of a post-Blair era, sticks a spoke in these wheels. “Things have been getting worse for as long as personal opinion surveys have been going on. If you ask anodyne questions, like ‘Would you be in favour of fining people for being a nuisance?’, what are they going to say? These polls create a constant drum-beat of dissatisfaction, and I’m very sceptical that they tell us much of use.”

Broken windows theory, meanwhile, “is problematic, empirically”, Perry says. “This is pre-replication crisis stuff.” (This is another psycho-social term, coined in 2009, describing scientific results that are widely accepted but impossible to replicate. Nobody has definitively proved that breaking one window drives anyone to break all the other windows in an area since.)

Not only might “share the carriage, not the noise” be an overreaction to how great a nuisance this is, the fine itself might work against its intention. “There’s reasonable evidence to suggest that people overestimate how badly other people behave,” says Perry. “That matters, because individual behaviour is strongly shaped by our perceptions of what others do.” It’s known as pluralistic ignorance – you might consider some behaviour aberrant but just do it anyway because you think others are doing it. “So if you highlight nuisance with public policy and reinforce it over and over again, politically, then you’re inadvertently making it seem common, exacerbating the misperception and reinforcing the negative behaviour.”

How we perceive each other, morally, is an incredibly important marker of society – what it’s like to live in, what it’s capable of. Everyone is unanimous on that. And the data here is “really heartening”, Mulgan says. According to one paper, 82% of people in the UK see our fellow citizens as morally good – which is higher than a lot of countries, especially the US, where more than 50% think their compatriots are morally bad. And that’s with the phone chaos. If we could just get everyone some headphones, we could nudge that up to 100.