MoJ Tagging Scandal 2

By most accounts the new prime minister made a good start, but sadly Rishi Sunak's honeymoon period proved short-lived with some very unwise appointments. As Russell Webster put it on Twitter:-

"In a move calculated to bring joy to all barristers, prison & probation staff, Dominic Raab is returning to his previous post as Justice Secretary"

But at least we've been spared Cruella Braverman who's back at the Home Office. Not for long though as her unique combination of arrogance, inability and sheer nastiness will surely see that appointment unravel again very quickly. Talking of arrogance, what a relief to see Rees-Mogg the Member of Parliament for the 19th century returning to the back benches and hopefully well-earned obscurity. With the grass-roots of the nasty party well and truly pissed-off, it'll be interesting to see how long it takes for some serious internal plotting to emerge. 

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Back to tagging, I see that Civil Service World has picked up on the scandal:-

‘Over-ambitious’ HMPPS electronic tagging plan ‘threw away’ £100m

MPs “unconvinced” of MoJ's ability to oversee overhaul of electronic tagging after “long history of poor performance"

HM Prison and Probation Service has been slammed for wasting £100m in a “high risk and over-ambitious” attempt to deliver a new case management system for electronic tagging.

The Ministry of Justice agency spent £98.2m on the Gemini system, only to scrap it before it was finished after years of delays saw it outpaced by advancements in technology. The Ministry of Justice said at the time that none of the expenditure would result in any future benefit.

MPs on the Public Accounts Committee said they were “deeply concerned about the scale of these losses”. They are “unconvinced” that the MoJ can overhaul the situation, given the “long history of poor performance in this area”, the committee's report analysing HMPPS’s attempts to transform electronic monitoring added.

PAC Meg Hillier warned that the current “outdated” system is “at constant risk of failure” which could put the public at risk. She called for a “serious explanation and a serious plan” from the MoJ for how they are going to “stop haemorrhaging” money.

The report also criticised the Ministry of Justice and HMPPS for failing to rigorously evaluate whether tagging reduces reoffending. It said the government was pushing ahead with a £1.2bn programme to expand tagging to another 10,000 people in the next three years despite this knowledge gap. HMPPS has now strengthened its analytical capacity, and has committed to evaluating its expansion programme, PAC added.

Gemini was part of HMPPS’s Electronic Monitoring Programme, which sought to overhaul the electronic tagging system used to monitor curfews and conditions of court or prison orders. The new system would have enabled police and probation officers to access real-time data. Currently, they have to submit manual requests for location data, limiting the value of using GPS tracking.

The software was meant to be ready in 2015 but was massively delayed because of its complexity and the need to integrate different suppliers’ work. While the committee said the decision to scrap the system in 2021 was the right decision at the time, saving £30m, it criticised the failures that led to this being the best option.

HMPPS’s “pursuit of a bespoke technical solution introduced complexity and inflexibility, and limited innovation”, while the agency also did not intervene early enough to resolve integration issues, PAC said. The committee also slammed the MoJ’s “weak governance” and “light-touch approach to scrutiny” despite the repeated delays.

HMPPS and the MoJ have now reformed their approaches to overseeing major projects and programmes, including introducing new thresholds for when risks and issues should be escalated for review, PAC said.

A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: “Innovative GPS and sobriety tags are helping us to crack down on crime, from alcohol-fuelled violence to burglary. Our decision to stop work on certain tagging systems saved taxpayers over £30m and we are now investing in doubling the number of offenders tagged by 2025 to better protect the public.”

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I notice that the Work With Offenders website provides some facts and useful analysis:- 

The rise and rise of tagging

The number of individuals being actively monitored with a location monitoring device (GPS) has more than doubled

We know that this government is keen on imprisonment, it is after all investing £4 billion to create 20,000 new prison places and the prison population is expected to increase by almost a quarter over the next three years.

The governments tough stance on crime is not restricted to incarceration though. It is also keen on making an increasing number of offenders subject to electronic tagging as today’s Electronic Monitoring Statistics make clear.

Here are the headlines:

The number of individuals being actively monitored increased by 12%

At 30 September 2022, the total number of individuals actively monitored was 14,996, an increase from 13,371 on the same date last year.

Electronic monitoring device court bail orders remains the largest cohort of individuals actively monitored by an electronic monitoring device

The number of individuals actively monitored under a court bail order was 5,979 as at 30 September 2022 or 40% of all individuals actively monitored. This is a 9% increase from 5,471 last year.

The number of individuals being actively monitored with a location monitoring device (GPS) has more than doubled

Between 30 September 2021 and 30 September 2022 the number of individuals actively monitored with a location monitoring device (GPS) increased very substantially by 143% (from 2,161 to 5,243). This increase is the result of the continued roll-out of electronic monitoring to new offender cohorts, particularly immigration bail.

The number of individuals being actively monitored with an alcohol monitoring device has more than doubled

As at 30 September 2022, 1,503 individuals were actively monitored with an alcohol monitoring device, a 153% increase from 593 last year. This reflects both the continued national roll-out of alcohol monitoring from March 2021 and the introduction of alcohol monitoring for prison leavers.

Analysis

As we have seen, this increase in the use of tagging was driven by extensions to the use of location (GPS) monitoring tags for new offender cohorts, particularly for immigration bail, as well as the continued roll-out of alcohol monitoring tags. However, the increases somewhat masks the fact that over the same period the number of individuals actively monitored as a condition of a community sentence has basically halved (down by 48%). This decrease began from April this year and is likely to be associated with mandating domestic abuse and safeguarding checks in all cases where electronic monitoring is proposed. It may well be that the chronically under-staffed probation service (an inspection report of five Probation Delivery Units in London published this week revealed that hundreds of offenders were not even allocated a probation officer) has just not had the time to do these checks, meaning that GPS tags cannot legally be imposed.

The increase in the numbers of people on tags as a court bail condition is attributable to two main factors. Firstly, the use of electronic monitoring for those on court bail increased sharply in early 2020 in response to the covid pandemic’s impact on the courts. Secondly, tags are now used for people on bail for immigration matters. The Immigration Act 2016 introduced a duty on the Home Office Secretary of State to impose an electronic monitoring condition on Foreign National Offenders and other non-UK citizens subject to deportation proceedings. Following this, in August 2021, HMPPS began using GPS monitoring for these individuals who have been released from Prisons or Immigration Detention under ‘Immigration Bail’ on behalf of the Home Office. From 31 August 2022 this was extended to Scotland and is planned to extend to Northern Ireland later this year which is likely to see numbers increase further.

Another part of the increase is due to the introduction of alcohol monitoring tags. Alcohol monitoring was introduced in October 2020 and went live throughout England and Wales on 31 March 2021 to support the new community sentencing option, the Alcohol Abstinence and Monitoring Requirement (AAMR). An AAMR may only be used when sentencing for alcohol-related criminal behaviour and it imposes a total ban on drinking alcohol for up to 120 days. Compliance with the ban is monitored electronically using an alcohol tag which continuously monitors for the presence of alcohol in offenders’ sweat. Although there are now 1,503 people subject to alcohol tags, it appears that take-up is reasonably slow, given the fact that low-level alcohol-related crimes are so common.

One inevitable consequence of the increase in the use of electronic tagging is that a proportion of people who are tagged will fail to comply with their tagging requirements and end up in custody, swelling our prison numbers even further.