Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, for what reasons the hardware and software providers in the new contract for electronic monitoring of offenders have been separated.

We divided the provision of electronic monitoring into discrete components, separating the supply of hardware and software, and competed these as separate lots because we consider this approach most likely to support the development and deployment of the best technology. This strategy also had the advantage of encouraging the participation of new entrants, SMEs and specialist companies, allowing them to bid for a particular component rather than the entire end-to-end service.