Crime and Courts Act 2013 (Commencement No. 18) Order 2018

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Wednesday 21st November 2018 Lords Chamber

Finally, what steps are being taken to inform and advise magistrates, judges and prison staff so that they may have confidence in the system? I very much regret that the Motion has been brought forward at this time without the report being publicly available for your Lordships and everybody else to read and comment on. I beg to move.

[Lord Beecham (Lab)]

My Lords, the story of the Government’s policy on electronic tagging over the past seven years has been one of a prolonged disaster. Of course, the Minister is not to blame for that. She has tried to be helpful, although today’s letter—referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas—warning recipients not to quote the contents of a document she sent us labelled “Embargoed” was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. I remain grateful for her attempt to be helpful, even if the Ministry of Justice appears to be vying with the Home Office in the competition to be seen as the most incompetent government department.

It is seven years since this policy began its gestation and 16 months since the announcement that the oligopolist G4S—an organisation presumed by the Government to be able to conduct all kinds of services across the system of government in this country—had been awarded a £25 million contract, notwithstanding the fact that it was then under investigation for fraud and that a National Audit Office report criticising the prolonged delay in implementing a policy of satellite tracking for offenders was soon to be published. A ban on G4S was imposed in 2013 after allegations of overcharging on contracts for the electrical monitoring of offenders, although the ban was lifted in 2014 on the basis that G4S had paid £109 million and Serco, another familiar scion of private enterprise, paid £70 million.

Labour’s shadow Lord Chancellor, Richard Burgon, has referred to G4S as having billed the Government,

“for tagging thousands of ‘phantom offenders’ – including those who were dead or in jail”,

and to,

“serious delays in informing the authorities that over 100 prisoners had been fitted with faulty electronic tags”.

In addition, Capita and two smaller firms became involved, although one withdrew after six months and another after 16 months, following incremental delays in the programme. Can the Minister explain how these failures in contracting occurred, and what steps have been taken to improve the department’s commissioning practice?

G4S purports to be able to provide public services across a broad range, including health, prisons and probation, but in January the Public Accounts Committee published a damning report, pointing out that a scheme due to be completed in 2013 was running five years late at a cost of £60 million to the taxpayer, with an additional irrecoverable loss of £9 million. What is more, the new tags are apparently expected to be available early next year. Can the Minister update us on progress, including both the starting and the completion dates for this project?

In its damning report in January 2018, the Public Accounts Committee described the programme as having been “fundamentally flawed”, and,

“so far … a catastrophic waste of public money which has failed to deliver the intended benefits”,

adding that the MoJ had,

“wasted a huge amount of time and … money to end up with … the same types of tags and supplier it had when the programme started”.

Significantly, the committee’s critique declares that the Ministry of Justice,

“lacked the capacity and capability to manage the difficulties and delays that it created”.

This appears to be confirmed by the fact that it is seven months since the report of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee asked why the draft order had been laid while piloting of the scheme was in progress—the very issue raised in the noble Lord’s Motion.

Just how long is that process of piloting going to take? Who will evaluate the response? What role will Members of both Houses have in considering the response and triggering the implementation of the order? And what plans are there to review the performance of the contractors? Who will conduct such reviews, and what provision will be made to terminate contracts in the event of failure on the part of the contractors, or if it transpires that, in any event, little or no improvement in reoffending by those fitted with tags has resulted?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank both noble Lords for their comments, and I hope to be able to address as many of the points raised as possible. First, clearly I shall have to take on the chin that criticism of what went on previously with this project. I do not have the information about what steps were taken, and why the failures occurred, in front of me, but I will write to the noble Lord and set out properly what happened previously and how we will address these issues in future.

I now turn to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. When I opened the debate, I tried to explain that this order provides an extension of provisions that already exist. There are other classes of subjects that can already be location monitored on a stand-alone basis. One of the reasons for not hanging around and waiting until the evidence, as he called it, is published, is that the report is not for stand-alone location monitoring on its own. It covers all sorts of different location monitoring, so it is more of an ongoing step, for all sorts of electronic monitoring, much of which is already covered by legislation.

The noble Lord took us back 12 years, to 2004 to 2006, and to what people said then. During the passage of the Crime and Courts Act, there was a significant debate about the civil liberties elements of the tagging, but technology has moved on significantly since then, and we are dealing with a very different beast from what was then being reported on.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. As I explained in my opening remarks, the technology we are talking about is GPS tracking. Yes, it is used in black boxes. My son has one in his car, so he does not do naughty things on the road—which is superb—and we all have it in our telephones. If the noble Lord is asking whether the technology has been tested, I think we can say that it certainly has. Indeed, it is probably used by most of us on a daily basis as we make our way around in the world using Google Maps. More specifically, the partners in place that will be building up the service providers all have great experience in this area. For example, mapping the data from the tags will be done by Airbus—which I think probably knows a fair amount about where things are, particularly aeroplanes in the sky. Of course we are confident that the technology works, and I believe that the pilot has made us confident that the application of it for this particular group of people is a good thing.

The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, commented on the timing of the publication of the report. I am now in two minds about why I shared that anyway. I did it to put noble Lords’ minds at rest, because the responses from the pilot were, as we have heard, fairly positive. I cannot give the noble Lord a date for publication, but it will be very soon. That is how all this has fitted together.

As for the timing of the SI, noble Lords discussed this in the Moses Room many months ago, and one of the reasons for the timing relates to an issue that was raised slightly later, about engaging with stakeholders. How can we ensure that this system is actually used by the people who need to be able to step up and say, “You can have a tag, because we can trust you to go into the community, provided that you do certain things”? We have found that, the more we can engage with the people within the criminal justice system who will make those orders, the more likely they are to use the tag. We wanted to get the timing of the SI right so that we could engage with stakeholders.

The noble Lord also mentioned charging. I think that I too mentioned that in my opening remarks. It takes one hour a day, and—to be a bit brutal—it is slightly better than being in custody to have to sit down somewhere and charge a tag. There is also the portable battery charger; I talked about that too. So I do not believe this is a huge issue. The design, too, is much better. We have all seen that the size of these things has now come right down to an insignificant size that will go under a sock, which is very good.

As for resourcing, the cost of monitoring has been brought down significantly by technology—and on the flip side, there are benefits. The cost of investigations could be lower for the police as they look for people they want to rule in or out of possible criminality.

I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, about G4S. I will write to him and set out what happened with G4S in the past, but I reassure him that we have run a fully compliant, open and competitive bidding process for all service providers. There is no scope to exclude bidders within this system, even if they are subject to an ongoing investigation. I recognise the noble Lord’s concerns. We are obviously keeping things under a careful, watchful eye, but we are pleased with the service providers we have.

Finally, on reporting, there are no specific plans to publish an individual report on the effectiveness of the new service, but the ministry will monitor take-up and effectiveness as part of the benefits realisation and will also report on the service providers’ performance. I am sure the noble Lord will find that very interesting. It will report on their performance against service level agreements and the number of orders being managed as part of wider regular offender management publications. I think noble Lords will see the numbers, there will be commentary about how well the service is working and there will be the results of the longer-term pilot by MOPAC in due course.

[Lord Beecham]

Before the Minister sits down, will she give an indication of when we will get the reports she has just referred to?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton]

I am afraid I cannot. We know that the first tranche of GPS tags will be coming out at the end of 2018. Full rollout is expected by summer 2019. I think that a period will have to elapse from full rollout until we can get some proper numbers, so I think it will be after that, but obviously I cannot set anything in stone.