BTP officer numbers fall more than 10% as union labels fines inadequate
The Guardian’s First Edition briefing on Tuesday turned to the question of whether the campaign can work. Its subheading said the prime minister’s campaign against noisy passengers “has struck a chord with commuters” — “whether anyone hears him remains to be seen” — and the article about the campaign launch had been most-read across the Guardian website throughout the morning, the briefing noted. To find out more, the author spoke to a bus driver, a transport expert and a cultural critic.
Burnham launched the crusade with a chatty Instagram post recorded on a morning train into Manchester Piccadilly, setting his sights on the phenomenon of “loudcasting” — or “headphone dodging” — which he called “one of the most annoying things on public transport.” Alongside a nationwide campaign encouraging people to plug in their headphones and “share the carriage, not the noise,” Burnham announced new guidance to help local transport authorities introduce fines of up to £100 for nuisance behaviour like vaping, littering and playing loud music or videos on buses. Train operating companies already hold powers to impose fines of up to £1,000 for antisocial behaviour. “It’s a simple thing, but one that will make journeys that little bit better for all of us,” Burnham said. About 88% of Britons, according to recent polling cited by the briefing, consider it unacceptable to play music out loud on a train.
It remains unclear how the rules would be enforced, the briefing said. Government officials have reassured bus drivers that they will not be expected to police passengers themselves, with the job falling to transport safety officers or police officers. Mark, a bus driver in central London, said he and his colleagues simply don’t have the capacity to help. He spends his working life in the glass cabinet at the front of the vehicle and said he can’t hear every noise or spot every puff of vape smoke on the top deck while navigating city traffic and watching for fare-dodging. His route has become noisier in recent years, though he was keen to stress that it is “an all-ages” issue and not to lay the blame solely with younger passengers. He doubts Burnham can isolate the problem to public transport: “It’s a whole society thing: being kinder and more aware of their environment.” “It’s not workable without resources,” Mark said. “I don’t really see how it would be enforceable: you can’t have someone on every bus and train.”
The briefing noted that fines for nuisance noise on trains are already vanishingly rare in practice, with offenders able to shut up or leave the carriage before enforcement arrives. British Transport Police officer numbers have fallen by more than 10% over the past two years, leaving passengers themselves to challenge the “noisy doom-scroller.” Transport for London has done work on bystander intervention, suggesting straightforward ways to interrupt bad behaviour without putting yourself in danger, though many would think twice about confronting a stranger in the confines of a moving vehicle, the briefing said.
Not everyone is impressed by the scale of the response. Sharon Graham, general secretary of Unite, described the policy as “well-meaning but wholly inadequate” to tackle the “avalanche of escalating abuse” faced by the transport workers her union represents. Guardian transport correspondent Gwyn Topham said there has been “a massive escalation in reported assaults on public transport across the country” and reported earlier this month on the growing number of verbal and physical assaults faced by transport workers and passengers. The briefing also recalled the death of bus driver Keith Rollinson at Elgin bus station after a violent assault by a teenage passenger.
The briefing acknowledged the argument that antisocial behaviour exists on a continuum, and that a “nip it in the bud” approach might prevent more serious problems from escalating. Its author wrote that zero-tolerance policing has a mixed record — “if you detect Tony Blair vibes here, so do I” — and that “dropping a grand for loudcasting your tunes has more than a whiff of New Labour’s respect agenda and the classist asbo culture it ushered in, which singularly failed to tackle antisocial behaviour at its roots.”
Still, the briefing said, there is much to be said for elevating the issue from shared eye-rolls to official tannoy announcements. Topham predicted the policy will appeal hugely to commuters. “What he’s done well is to acknowledge an everyday irritation, that doesn’t cost a lot of money to fix, but can hopefully alter public behaviour,” he said.
On whether telling people to behave better can work, writer Dan Hancox, whose latest book, Multitudes, is about crowd behaviour, told the briefing that gentle nudges towards more respectful behaviour, rather than sledgehammer fines, have made a difference historically. He recalled “a real moral panic” in the early 2010s over teenagers playing tinny MP3s aloud from basic mobile phones, behaviour he defended at the time: “It was a rare example of sharing of music as a social adhesive, at a moment when David Cameron was introducing austerity and the spaces in which young people could gather together were being shut down.” Within a couple of years, the behaviour had died down again, as often happens after the initial buzz around new technology and the social pressure points they create.
The phenomenon of people playing video out loud on their phones has got noticeably worse in the last couple of years, Hancox believes, and it is not all about the young this time — younger travellers seem more likely to rely on noise-cancelling headphones, which some audiologists have raised concerns over for potential links to auditory processing problems. He refuted the notion that people have “forgotten how to behave” since the Covid lockdown: “It feels like an easy answer for something that is much more complex. But it didn’t go on for that long, and the really remarkable thing about human beings is how quickly and elastically they bounce back to their previous sets of behaviours.” The more boring answer, he suggested from his own research, is that as 5G makes watching videos easier to do wherever we are, people are simply seizing that opportunity.
Crowd psychology tells us that other people’s propensity to broadcast noise has a minimal effect on our own behaviour, Hancox said: “People’s pre-existing values and social mores are incredibly robust and are unlikely to change based on the behaviour of a complete stranger.” That, he said, makes behaviour much more susceptible to the kind of nudge messaging over the train tannoy that Burnham is proposing.
Anxiety about strangers and the malign influence of the crowd tends to arise at moments of wider pressures, Hancox said: “When people are worried about paying the rent or feeding their families, as wars in the wider world rock our sense of stability and faith in human beings, our suspicion of the random person on the bus grows. But my day-to-day experience of life in a big and supposedly alienating city like London tells me people want this kind of spontaneous connection more than ever, and it’s a joy when it happens. Even if it’s just a few warm words exchanged with a stranger at the bus stop, on the train or in the shops – this is what it means to live in a society.”
The author wrote that few voices have suggested Burnham should be concentrating on more important matters, arguing that other people’s noise and inconsiderate behaviour on public transport “has become shorthand for wider concerns about social cohesion, generational conflict and political fragmentation”: “we are all making much more noise, and have become much worse at listening to what anyone else is actually saying.” In the author’s own experience, two things can be true at once — a growing anxiety that this indicates an unravelling of the social contract, and interactions with fellow passengers that in the main reassure us this is not, in fact, the case.
Elsewhere in the briefing: France’s prime minister has said he has asked regional authorities to impose partial curfews in some cities, after the government admitted police had “lost control” in several places during violent weekend protests. Last weekend’s mass protests across France involved an estimated more than half a million people, with the unrest including rioting, looting and violent clashes with outnumbered police in cities including Paris, Marseille and Limoges; the interior minister conceded that police “lost control” in some cities, while President Emmanuel Macron demanded a full security review. The briefing reported that French protests have escalated with riots, looting and 2,400 arrests.
Burnham has told officials to rip up their plans for how to fix Thames Water and present him with more radical options for what to do with the stricken company. At least 53 people have been killed in a Houthi ballistic missile attack on a training camp for Yemeni government forces, the largest single loss of life since the country’s civil war reignited in September. Israeli police have detained 10 people in a rare raid against settlers after a weekend of extreme violence in the occupied West Bank, including an attack on US photojournalist Heidi Levine. Nigel Farage undermined his own claims that a £5m gift was for security when he referred to the money as a reward for Brexit, according to one of his closest aides. Next week, the chancellor, John Healey, will deliver his first budget.
Today’s front pages, as the briefing listed them: the Guardian leads with “Burnham orders radical rethink of options to fix Thames Water”; the Times leads with “No increase to capital gains tax in the budget”; the Mail writes “Kemi: Budget could be even worse than Reeves bloodbath”; the Telegraph has “Labour cuts £2bn from Army from front line”; and the i Paper runs with “Two-child cap on childcare benefits will be lifted by April.” The FT leads on “Challenges facing Macron deepen after street clashes reignite French debt rout,” Metro has “The French correction,” the Express splashes on “NHS is ‘simply not ready’ for another winter crisis,” and the Sun on an RAF crash probe writes “Air heads.”
In sport, James Maddison scored an excellent first goal before Omar Marmoush and Ben Davies wrapped up the scoring as Spurs beat a stubborn Coventry 3-1. The judge who sentenced former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar to up to 175 years in jail in 2018 for the sexual abuse of more than 250 women and girls has condemned the lack of meaningful change in the decade since Nassar’s crimes were exposed. Australian quick Scott Boland ended the day with four wickets against South Africa, who finished on 97-5 on the second day of the test match.
The newsletter team also flagged a new Senate House Library exhibition charting the history of housing and poverty in London over the past 200 years, previewed by Jessica Murray, and Patrick Greenfield’s piece on what is at stake at the Cop17 biodiversity summit, which quotes scientists saying “we are living through the largest loss of life since the time of the dinosaurs.”
The briefing’s Upside item reported that bird flu wiped out the colony of sandwich terns nesting at Pagham harbour, West Sussex, in 2022, but their numbers have since bounced back to 756 breeding pairs, and populations of other birds such as ringed plovers and oystercatchers have also increased along the same coastline. The turnaround is thanks to conservation efforts by RSPB staff and volunteers, including removing certain vegetation to make space for shorebirds to nest and erecting special fencing to keep out predators such as foxes. The RSPB’s Wez Smith said: “It’s taken several years of dedicated conservation action, but the situation began to ‘tern’ around last year, and the site is now thriving with record breaking populations using it.”