England: £700m plan to tag 40,000 offenders

Shabana Mahmood, the justice secretary, is reported to have secured £700 million in funding from the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to buy nearly 30,000 additional electronic tags. The move will increase the Probation Service’s budget by approximately a third and allow it to quadruple the number of individuals being monitored electronically.

The Ministry of Justice is also expected to unveil new types of tags capable of detecting illicit drug use by measuring biometric indicators such as heart rate and blood pressure. Ms Mahmood has characterised drug-monitoring tags as the “holy grail” of tagging technology, citing the high proportion of crime linked to substance misuse.

Low-risk offenders may instead be monitored through GPS-enabled smartphones and biometric check-ins, preserving ankle tags for higher-risk individuals.

The government has commissioned Google and Palantir Technologies to develop AI software to assess an offender’s risk level. This system would integrate GPS tracking data with other information to detect changes in an individual’s risk profile.

The Probation Service currently has capacity to tag about 9,000 individuals at any one time. Under the plans, this figure is set to rise to nearly 40,000. The overall number of tags in circulation is expected to reach 50,000, including 11,000 allocated to individuals not convicted of crimes, such as those on bail or subject to immigration control.

Tagging methods presently in use include GPS and radio frequency devices, with increasing deployment of so-called sobriety tags, which detect alcohol consumption through perspiration analysis.

The government is also set to adopt most of the recommendations in a review by former justice secretary David Gauke, marking what will likely be the most extensive overhaul of sentencing legislation in decades.

An MoJ source confirmed the scale of investment, telling The Times: “This ends years of underinvestment in the Probation Service under the last government. The service suffered from years of austerity and was torn apart by a botched privatisation under the Conservatives. This government is investing in a Probation Service that keeps the public safe.”

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, criticised the funding decision, saying: “£700 million could have been spent expediting the removals of foreign criminals clogging up our jails, or maximising court capacity to reduce the 17,000 people in prison awaiting trial.

“But instead, Labour have decided to spend it trying to manage dangerous prisoners who they will release early. It’s inevitable these criminals will reoffend or breach the terms of their tag and end up back in prison. This won’t put a dent in soaring crime rates across the country.”