Offender-monitoring tags inquiry
Closed
What the inquiry looked at
“Electronic monitoring of prisoners—known informally as 'tagging'—plays an important role in supporting prisoner rehabilitation in the community. In 2011 the Ministry of Justice launched a programme to develop a new, world-leading tag that would incorporate GPS technology. However, a National Audit Office report found that developing the tags has been beset with problems and cost increases as a result of high-risk approach and weak governance. The Ministry planned to procure parts of the service from four providers, with a fifth provider integrating all the parts but contracts for procurement were signed two years later than planned. G4S has now been appointed to complete the work by mid-2019, a total delay of five years. The programme intended to save between £9 million and £30 million, but instead the Ministry has spent an additional £60 million. The tagging service is expected to cost £470 million between 2017 and 2025. The Committee will ask the Ministry of Justice about its attitude to risk, why it contracted the project in the manner they did and why that went wrong, and what it is doing to assure the success of the tagging programme in the years ahead.”
The committee's words, from the inquiry page on parliament.uk ↗.
What it found
Offender-monitoring tags can be a cost-effective alternative to custodial sentences, but the Ministry of Justice’s (the Ministry) delivery of the new generation electronic monitoring programme so far has been fundamentally flawed. The simple idea of replacing the contracts for electronic tags was made overly ambitious, overly complicated and has been poorly delivered.
The programme has so far been a catastrophic waste of public money which has failed to deliver the intended benefits. The Ministry pressed ahead with the programme without clear evidence that it was to be operated or that it was deliverable. Its selection of a high-risk approach to procure the new electronic tags, and its poor management of both the programme and potential suppliers, exacerbated these problems. The Ministry of Justice has ultimately wasted a huge amount of time and taxpayers’ money to end up with an approach which uses the same types of tags and supplier it had when the programme started.
Many of the lessons the Ministry claims to have learned are simply common sense and should not have resulted in such a shambolic delivery of an important programme. We welcome the Ministry of Justice and HM Prison and Probation Service’s realism and candour, but this situation should not have been allowed to happen in the first place.
We do not expect to see similar failings in any of the other 16 major projects currently being undertaken by the Ministry of Justice.
What the government said
No government response is linked to this report.
How the inquiry ran
Each dot is a dated item listed on this page, from the inquiry's opening on 19 October 2017 to 24 January 2018.
- Oral evidence 13 Nov 2017
- Report 24 Jan 2018
What it recommended
The committee's recommendations are not listed here yet. Read them in 15th Report - Offender-monitoring tags ↗ on parliament.uk.
Evidence
Oral evidence sessions 1
- 13 Nov 2017No witnesses recordedparliament.uk ↗