Electronic Monitoring of Offenders

Lord Lemos Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Keen of Elie (Con)]

My Lords, we are aware that more than 5,000 released offenders were not fitted with tags in the first half of this year and consequently went unmonitored on their release. With the pressure that the early release scheme has placed on the system, that number is liable to have increased. Can the Minister tell the House what proportion of prisoners released as part of the early release scheme were not tagged before they were released? If he is unable to tell us today, will he commit to publishing that data in his response to the Written Questions I tabled on this very point on 22 October?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Lemos) (Lab)]

There are various reasons why individuals who have an electronic monitoring order are not yet tagged, including not being at their address when officers arrive or being within in the contractual 48-hour period for installation. They may have been recalled, or the tag may have been tampered with or cut off. I do not agree with the noble and learned Lord that the earned progression model and release under it are likely to have increased those numbers. The earned progression model has been planned and releases under that are different—I make this point every time I speak on this at the Dispatch Box, and it is a really important point. It is not the same as the emergency early release schemes introduced under the last Government and at the beginning of this one. It is a planned process happening in 10 tranches. We made sure that the tag resources were available through Serco, so I do not agree with that. On the question of data, we will publish data on tagging in the normal way.

[Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames (LD)]

My Lords, the Government now seem to recognise that home tagging after a prisoner’s release has serious problems. First, until released offenders can be tagged at home, they can be a frightening menace to their victims. Secondly, if they have no stable home, they can prove very difficult to tag at all. Yesterday in the other place, Minister McKinnell told my honourable friend Jess Brown-Fuller MP that tagging at prisons before release, so-called tagging at source, was being ramped up. She welcomed a suggestion from Dame Emily Thornberry MP that prison officers should be trained to fit the tags and were willing to take such training and do so. Tagging at source is obviously a better and, I suggest, a cheaper system and one wonders therefore why home tagging was ever an option. The Government have an extra £100 million earmarked for tagging. Why can tagging at source not be organised almost at once? Why the delay?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

Home tagging was instituted under the previous Government and is part of the Serco contract, as we have discussed before. The Government agree that tagging at source is the right approach, and that is what Minister McKinnell said yesterday. We are rolling that out and are doing it in an orderly way. We are receiving a great deal of co-operation from prison staff as we go about that. That is the right answer, and that is what we are going to do. On this whole question of tagging, I think all noble Lords who work in this area know that tagging will be an increasingly important part of the criminal justice system. The way we go about it will evolve and, exactly as the noble Lord, Lord Marks, said, tagging at source is the future and we will get there as soon as possible.

[The Lord Bishop of Gloucester]

I remain concerned that the problem is constantly being framed as a lack of prison capacity, but there needs be a very different narrative which includes a major focus on reducing reoffending and addressing what underlies so much offending. Can the Minister say what is being done to ensure that, alongside tagging, the Probation Service is properly funded, resourced and supported to address the issues that underlie the offending of those who are tagged?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I hesitate to correct the right reverend Prelate—I know that is not good form, especially not coming from me—but I did not frame the problem as part of the prison capacity problem. I framed the issues around tagging as being related to our earned progression model. This gives me an opportunity to advertise the presentation I have arranged for noble Lords on 23 November on the earned progression model. On reducing reoffending, I should have declared my interest at the beginning, which is that I was the lead non-executive director and chair of the agency board of HMPPS until 2025. During that time, in relation to one of the key aspects that the right reverend Prelate knows is part of reducing reoffending—accommodation—we secured accommodation for 35,000 people leaving prison. That is a substantial contribution to reducing reoffending.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, the Government have the right idea about tagging, and I support the Minister in saying that. However, I think there are serious problems in the operation of it now and the ambition for it for the future. First of all, tags are not being fitted, and if they are not fitted at source, they never get fitted. Probably more important is the future, with geolocation for devices, which allows people to be excluded from areas, as well as to be kept within areas, and sobriety tagging, which stops people drinking when drink is the aggravating factor in their offending pattern. There is no strategy as to how this is going to develop in the future. There is no real connection to the police or, as has already been said, the Probation Service. The current system means that an email goes from Serco or whichever commercial entity it is, and within the next few days, the police might get some information about a rapist who breached the curfew around the rape. That could all be done digitally immediately. I think the ambition is incredibly good—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My question is: what are the Government’s ambition and strategy for rolling out tags in the future? I have not seen one.

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I disagreed with the right reverend Prelate and now I am going to disagree with the policeman—former policeman. I do not accept that characterisation. The situation on the specific question that the noble Lord raises about knowing where tagged people are is that by Christmas, because we are rolling out our plan, probation officers in every region will know the whereabouts of people on tags within 10 minutes, so the situation that he describes should not arise. I do not accept that there is no plan. I have already said that this is an important part of the future. It is an important part, for example, of the work that we are doing on domestic abuse in relation to alcohol tags. GPS tagging is improving. This will continue and it is extremely significant.

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister knows only too well that the private sector is due to pocket an extra £100 million as a consequence of the expansion of the tagging service. As I said only last week, it is on its knees. It is very difficult to see how we can improve the situation when we have unacceptable strings on the table for the unions to accept. Therefore, does the Minister agree that HMPPS needs to remove these strings and give the staff a bigger slice of this £700 million pie, as opposed to their going on strike, which we do not need at all in this country?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

I am sure that my noble friend—my good friend—will understand that I do not want to comment on the negotiations that are under way, but I will say this: the staff of HMPPS have risen to challenges that many of us would find impossible. I pay tribute to them and they deserve credit. As we ask more and more of them, we will of course work with them to ensure that they are motivated and properly rewarded.

[Lord Bellingham (Con)]

My Lords, can the Minister tell the House how many of the 5,000-plus prisoners released have reoffended since this scheme started in its latest format?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

The figures on tagging, as I have said, will be released in the normal way. We publish stats on reoffending and will continue to do so.

[Lord Foster of Bath (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister tells us very clearly that Serco has been meeting its contract requirement since March. However, the Chief Inspector of Prisons points out that that contract requires specification of attempting to tag rather than succeeding in tagging; that 45% of GPS tags and 40% of alcohol tags have been fitted late; that one in five people has had to wait up to two weeks for a tag; and that, amazingly, one in 10 has waited up to five months for their tag. If that is contract specification, is there not something dreadfully wrong with the contract?

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

The noble Lord is an expert on this; he chairs the committee and quoted all those statistics at me without reading his notes. He knows, as I do, that what we inherited was a tagging system in crisis. What we have done is to put the arrangements with Serco on a better footing. I do not deny for a moment that there are still problems. We have access to its performance data, and the situation is being better managed than it was before, but there is still some way to go.