Should prisoners pay for their own incarceration like people pay for social care?

The most interesting thing about this result is how little either side actually engaged with the practicalities the question raised. Yes won by ten points out of 134 votes, yet nobody on the winning side grappled seriously with how someone with no income and no assets is meant to pay, leaving a policy question about work programmes and cost recovery to be settled mostly on gut feeling about desert and choice.

The Yes case, such as it was, rested on the idea that crime is a choice and choices carry consequences, with the most-respected argument on that side proposing that inmates "contribute their time & labour" rather than sit idle, on the grounds that "being able to contribute and do something useful would be preferable to 'being banged up for 20+ hours'." Another voter drew the comparison to NHS prescription charges directly: "we all pay taxes to support the justice system. So why not then charge" — though a reply arrived to correct the thrust of that very argument, suggesting even Yes voters weren't reading each other closely.

No voters were thinner on the ground and more scattered in their objections. The highest-rated dissent sidestepped the funding question entirely to worry about wrongful or politically motivated imprisonment — "what if you're Lucy Connelly banged up politically for opining against state failures?" — while others made the blunter practical point that "most in prison i assume have no money," and one voter would rather any money owed went to victims, not the state. The two sides barely met: Yes argued principle and labour, No argued practicality and who deserves the money.

The vote echoes a familiar British instinct, the same one that underpins means-tested social care itself, that public provision should claw back something from those who use it, even when the person being asked to pay is by definition the least able to.

For a question about who should foot a £5 billion bill, the chamber settled it on ten points and barely a costed argument between them.