The government has ‘thrown away’ £98 millions of taxpayers’ money on a failed case management system for electronic tagging, MPs have reported. The House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee highlighted the ‘high-risk and over-complicated delivery model’ for the government’s tagging programme which provided ‘poor oversight of suppliers, overambitious timetable and light-touch scrutiny’ from the Ministry of Justice and ultimately led to the failure of the scheme’s case management system.
The new system suffered ‘avoidable mistakes’ that left the electronic tagging system ‘reliant on legacy systems that needed urgent remedial action’ costing a further £9.8 million, according to the MPs’ report. Mistakes included the prison service failing to provide the police and probation services with timely access to the electronic monitoring system, outdated hardware leading to the live service failing six times since May last year; and the prison service, and its supplier (Capita), failing to deliver the new case management system.
‘The prison and probation service is reliant on outdated technology that is swallowing taxpayers’ money just to stand still,’ commented Dame Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee. ‘The existing system is at constant risk of failure – and let us be clear that in the case of tagging, “failure” can mean direct and preventable risk to the public – and attempts to transform it have failed.’
Hillier went on to say that the ‘incredible scale of waste and loss’ in the Government’s Covid response should ‘in no way inure us to this: that’s another hundred million pounds of taxpayers’ money for essential public services just thrown away, wasted, lost’.
Dr Roger Grimshaw, research director at the Center for Crime and Justice Studies, called the current debacle ‘an alarming picture of government failures’. Its plan to expand electronic supervision outside of the prison system was ‘unguided by firm evidence about any positive role in rehabilitation’, according to Grimshaw.
The loss is compounded by the fact that the prison service still does not know how electronic tagging fully works as well as crucial problems with data, including not knowing how many ethnic minority offenders are tagged. MPs were ‘unconvinced’ that the Ministry of Justice is equipped to handle increasing problems. MPs said that they would continue to monitor the ‘serious risks’ that remain in expanding tagging and the need to obtain new contracts by early 2024 as well as plans to press ahead with an additional £1.2 billion programme, expanding electronic monitoring to an additional 10,000 people over the next three years.
