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MoJ wastes £98m on tagging
National Audit Office report heavily critical of ongoing electronic monitoring problems.

Electronic monitoring

This government has set out to be “tough on crime”, by increasing sentence lengths, restricting access to parole and a host of other measures. Amongst these measures, the MoJ regularly highlights its commitment to tag more people – on bail, community sentences and when released from prison. But today’s report from the National Audit Office finds that the government’s electronic monitoring programme is a shambles. The new tagging system is years overdue and the MoJ had to write off £98m when it terminated the Gemini contract run by Capita. Most importantly, the NAO concludes that:

“Evidence on the effectiveness of tagging remains weak, particularly on reducing reoffending and diverting offenders from prison”.

Key findings

The NAO says that HMPPS has failed to modernise its tagging system primarily because of its failure to deliver its new “Gemini” case management system which it had to write off at a cost of £98m to the taxpayer. It made the mistake of continuing with a “tower” contracting structure which involved four suppliers each responsible for providing a different element of the service, whose work needed to be brought together by HMPPS as integrator (see graphic below). HMPPS set out to manage the complex interdependencies between suppliers but failed to do so effectively.

The GPS monitoring system is not doing what it promised. HMPPS expected Gemini and the user portal to allow users such as police and probation officers to have self-service access to case information and to historic and real-time maps of offenders’ movements. Instead, users must request mapping data from Capita, which creates a delay, and HMPPS cannot collect information on the timeliness or quality of the service.

Shockingly (if not surprisingly, given the track record of tagging in this country), HMPPS’s ability to carry out analysis and evaluation is severely constrained by the poor quality and availability of data.

HMPPS did not analyse reoffending and offenders’ diversion from prison as planned because of constrained resources. HMPPS estimates that to break-even from its investment in its expansion programme, it would need to divert around 5,000 offenders from prison or deter 9,000 repeat offences by 2025-26. However, the effect of tagging on these outcomes remains unproven and poor-quality data mean HMPPS is heavily reliant on anecdotal information.

Conclusions

The National Audit Office sets out HMPPS’ plans to address these shortcomings and says that HMPPS is “better placed to avoid repeating past mistakes”. However, it cautions that the timescale is tight and the problems of integrating the different outsourced workstreams may still persist.

The report concludes with a further warning that we do not know the value of electronic monitoring in  protecting the public and reducing reoffending.

My personal view is that the government should have abandoned the tagging system altogether and moved to a mobile phone based system (already in use in the USA and elsewhere) which used secure geolocation. In addition to being much cheaper, this approach means that people on tags would no longer have to wear a tag advertising to one and all (including potential employers) their status as “an offender”.

 

Thanks to Andy Aitchison for kind permission to use the header image in this post. You can see Andy’s work here.

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4 responses

  1. The delivery of the service is so poor they have literally no data to report back on. You cannot get a bigger IT failure than that. Indeed, this looks worse than mere incompetence. It looks deliberate. At an early stage it would have been obvious to everyone that the project was failing. It should, then, have been reviewed scaled back or stopped. But, no, the MoJ decided to ignore the huge elephant in the room and carry on spending money. Therefore it seems like the only measure the government has, for measure project delivery performance, is “if money is continuing to be being asked for and spent.”
    Monkeys in a psychological random analysis experiment could do better. Remember monkey’s get any question right 50%of the time if it’s a yes or no question. As does a coin toss.
    Those civil servants, responsible for failed delivery, failed reporting of that failure and failure to review the project (at all), must be held accountable and sacked. That is the only way change for the better can occur within the Civil service and its management of by the Cabinet Office.
    The loss of £98M is a criminal loss and staff must be prosecuted. Perhaps a new law created that makes the civil servants personally liable for the financial losses, they caused, would bring them to their senses, I am sure. Sick of it, I am.

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