Brandon Lewis – 2022 Statement on Electronic Monitoring of Criminals

The statement made by Brandon Lewis, the Secretary of State for Justice, in the House of Commons on 11 October 2022.

We set out in our beating crime plan how we will improve public protection and increase public confidence in the justice system. We are determined to empower the police and probation to keep us safe; through providing them with the technology and resources they need, we will crack down on the repeat offenders who are blighting our neighbourhoods.

Since April 2021 our acquisitive crime project has been using GPS electronic location monitoring to track the movements of burglars, robbers and thieves released on licence and serving a standard determinate sentence of 12 months or more across 19 police force areas. I have now laid a statutory instrument to expand this world-first project to include offenders serving shorter sentences of 90 days or more. This will come into force on 26 October.

Electronic monitoring will be a compulsory condition on the offender’s licence for the remainder of their sentence up to a maximum of 12 months, other than in exceptional circumstances where probation assess that an offender’s health or personal situation make the use of a tag inappropriate.

Through this measure we aim to deter further offending and reduce crime; expanding the project to offenders serving shorter sentences will increase the number of offenders captured by the legislation by around 2,000 by March 2025.

This expansion will be subject to robust evaluation, including of impact on reoffending and cost-effectiveness. The evaluation will be conducted by the Ministry of Justice data and analysis directorate; the final evaluation conclusions report will be peer reviewed by independent academics before publication. It will allow us to better assess the most effective period for electronic monitoring of acquisitive offenders, helping to identify what is necessary and proportionate use and therefore influencing future decisions on how electronic monitoring can be used to reduce reoffending.

The location monitoring data is used to support the work of probation and the police. Using “crime mapping” technology we overlay police acquisitive crime data with tagging data to identify if any tagged offenders were in the vicinity of a given crime, to better equip the police to investigate offences, apprehend or rule out suspects and to support prosecutions. Alongside this, probation practitioners are provided with summaries of an offender’s movements and compliance behaviour and, to further enhance supervision, they can investigate an offender’s movements in closer detail using a self-service portal.

Throughout this joint endeavour between the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office, feedback from policing and probation has been positive, and expansion is supported by them.

A copy of this statement has also been laid in the House of Lords by my colleague, the Lord Bellamy.