Pilot schemes involving the satellite tracking of about 1,000 criminals will begin this autumn – but they will not include the “weekend jail” scheme highlighted by the prime minister in his recent prisons speech.
The schemes will focus on using the next generation of location-monitoring electronic GPS tags for defendants on bail who might otherwise be remanded in prison.
The pilots are intended to give the courts an option to toughen community orders and encourage prison governors to make greater use of temporary release schemes.
However, they will not include plans to test the introduction of weekend-only prisons, which David Cameron floated in his prisons speech earlier this year. He said the new tags could “help some offenders with a full-time job to keep it, and just spend weekends in custody instead”.
A justice ministry source confirmed the weekend-only prison option will not be tested in this year’s pilot schemes, and that work on the plan is only in the “very early” stages. “This is being considered. No decisions have yet been made,” the source said.
However, the Ministry of Justice is “exploring” how satellite tracking could provide additional safeguards “that might enable offenders, some of whom may be women with babies, to be given a community sentence where at present they would be sent to custody”.
In his prisons speech, Cameron said it was a “sad, but true, fact” that last year 100 babies were living in prisons in England and Wales.
The latest satellite-tracking pilot schemes will last for 12 months and will take place in eight police force areas across the Midlands and in south-east England.
Plans to introduce satellite tracking of offenders were first announced 12 years ago. The technology was tested in official trials that concluded in 2007 and questioned whether the benefits could be delivered at a price that justified a national rollout of the scheme.
The justice minister, Dominic Raab, announced the details of the new schemes in a letter to the justice select committee. He said they would be used to test the GPS tags on a range of offenders and suspects.
However, the timing of the pilots means that only offenders who can already be tagged under existing primary legislation can take part.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice said: “Earlier this year we announced our intention to launch a GPS tagging pilot to help us develop new approaches to the management of offenders in the community and help reduce reoffending.
“GPS tagging will allow us to monitor the movements of high-risk and persistent offenders who often cause so much harm in our communities. It will contribute to the creation of a safer society with fewer victims.
“This work is in its early stages and the results will be used to help inform future use of satellite tags.”
The GPS tagging pilot schemes are separate from the delay-hit programme to provide a new generation of electronic tags to be used for the up to 14,000 offenders who are already subject to this monitoring at any one time.
A decision was taken in February to terminate a £32m contract to develop a bespoke electronic tag in favour of buying off-the-shelf tracking technology.
