The Commons public accounts committee report on the Ministry of Justice’s electronic monitoring fiasco is still not the full story (New tags for offenders ‘waste of money’ - MPs, 24 January). Notwithstanding the ministry’s secretive approach, plans for the mass expansion of GPS tracking, the absence of an evidence base, and the futility of developing a bespoke “super tag” were all discernible in 2014, and it is unclear why no one was able to halt such a misguided programme well before £60m had been wasted.
Justice secretary Chris Grayling pushed all this through in tandem with the privatisation of the probation service, and in his mind’s eye the upgrading of electronic monitoring was the counterpart of downgrading the status and skills of probation officers. Both programmes had commercial rather than penal rationales. Both have been expensive failures, each in their own way, but Grayling has not been called to account for either of them.
The over-complex, outsourced infrastructure set in place to manage the mass expansion of GPS tracking is no longer needed and should be dismantled. A modest and sensible use of tagging will not happen until electronic monitoring has been properly integrated into a restored, publicly owned probation service, as it mostly is in mainland Europe.
Mike Nellis
Emeritus professor of criminal and community justice, University of Strathclyde
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