The assumption is an obvious one: if you fine people for bad behaviour, they should stop. But human psychology is much more complicated than that. The reality is that financial penalties often fail because they inadvertently shift human behaviour from a moral framework to a market framework.

In other words, the punishable behaviour stops being about right or wrong and instead becomes an economic choice. For example, rather than thinking, ‘littering is bad for my community,’ people instead ask themselves, ‘Is it worth £100 to leave my rubbish rather than take it with me?’ A social wrongdoing now becomes a purchasable commodity: people can ‘buy’ the right to break a rule, because the distinction is no longer between illegal and legal, but what is legal for a price.

This phenomenon – sometimes known as the crowding-out effect – explains why fining parents for taking their children on holidays during term-time simply does not work. Despite increasing fines for unauthorised absences to £80 per parent (increasing to £160 if not paid in 21 days), more parents are taking their children out of school than ever. The number of penalty notices for school absences reached a record high of almost 500,000 in the 2024-2025 school year, with the Parentkind National Parent Survey revealing that more than one in five parents (around two million across the whole of the UK) removed their child from school to take them on........

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