Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of creating capacity in the National Probation Service for insourcing electronic monitoring.

Electronic monitoring (EM) is an effective criminal justice tool helping the police and probation keep the public safe by monitoring the movements of offenders and those on bail, restricting their liberty while ensuring they can remain in work or education.

EM has always been delivered using a contracted infrastructure and there are no current plans to move away from that model. Probation play a vital role in maximising the effectiveness of EM and obtaining the best outcomes for those who are tagged, which is why senior level sponsorship of EM within probation regions has been built into the new probation unified model.

As the sentencing white paper published recently demonstrates, this Government is committed to expanding the use of EM. For example, we intend to legislate to impose satellite enabled tagging on offenders released from custody who have committed burglary and theft offences. And the roll out of alcohol tags to monitor Alcohol Abstinence and Monitoring Requirements to help to break patterns of alcohol-induced offending will shortly begin in Wales.