Should the prisoner escort and custody service be reformed to reduce court delays?

The headline here is less the size of the majority than its silence: three in four voters backed reforming the prisoner escort and custody service, but almost none of the 32 who voted No bothered to say why, leaving the losing side a cipher against a Yes case that, while thin in number, was pointed in substance.

What Yes voters did offer ranged from structural to logistical. One argued the fault lies in incentives, not just delivery, contending that "the performance measures are obviously being gamed by the companies providing the 'service'" and proposing that courts stop paying providers when delays occur, on the theory that "privatised services don't care." Another skipped the contracting question entirely and reached for a redesign of the geography itself, suggesting magistrates "get into prisons, to hear cases" or that courts be relocated nearer prisons — even floating a tunnel to the holding cell.

No opinion from the No side survives on the page, so the roughly three in ten voters who rejected reform left no rebuttal to the charge that a private-sector escort system is failing courts in 69 locations and 59 prisons — whether they doubted the scale of the problem, feared the cost of overhaul, or simply distrusted another round of restructuring is left to guesswork.

The result lands on well-trodden ground: public frustration with outsourced justice infrastructure, echoing older rows over privatised probation and prison maintenance, where poor KPIs and contractor incentives are blamed for systemic failure rather than any single villain.

A chamber this lopsided, on a service this criticised, still couldn't produce a single considered case for leaving it alone.