
TAGGING JACKIE
As the government gets ready to roll out a massive expansion of the offender tagging programme in England and Wales, a whistleblower from inside Serco, the private company charged with running it, has told Channel 4 News the system is in 'chaos' and could be putting the public at risk.
The Serco insider works at the company's monitoring centre. We've called him Aaron to protect his identity.
He told us at one point the computer system was throwing out so much data, finding genuine breaches was 'like finding a needle in a haystack'.
'It was throwing out all these alerts that sometimes didn't mean
anything but there'd be thousands and thousands. We didn't know how to identify the genuine breaches from all this traffic of data that was coming into the system.'
He also claimed some offenders are going unmonitored and the company only realises it after being asked for information from police or probation looking for them.
'We've had somebody who they want to arrest for rape or potential assault, a serious assault of a victim, and you'd look up the records to identify the person that they're asking about. There's been instances where we haven't been able to give them that information because something has gone wrong when it's been installed, or something's happened in the system where the person has got a tag on, but we're not actively monitoring them. There's been instances where it's been weeks and weeks of where we think we're monitoring someone but they're not actively being monitored.'
Aaron described staff at the centre being asked by police for GPS location details of a tagged domestic abuse offender after his ex partner was found dead and he became a potential suspect. Aaron claims staff found he hadn't been monitored effectively 'due to an error.'
Serco won the 200 million pound government contract back in 2023 and it came into operation in May the following year, but it's had a
troubled history
.
The company has been fined for poor performance on the contract every month since it started.
In April, failures in the tagging system were exposed by
Channel 4's Dispatches
programme, including offenders going untagged for weeks.
In response, Serco said it was tagging a record number of people and its performance would continue to improve 'at pace.'
But Channel 4 News has uncovered potential flaws across the entire system – not just with Serco.
'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.'
Twenty one year old Samuel Mattocks was found by police with a knife in his bag. He was initially told to expect prison but, for his first offence, magistrates decided instead to give him a three month community sentence, a critical part of it being a tag to make sure he observed his curfew. He was told the tag would be fitted in two or three days.
For weeks, Samuel says he waited for the tagging company to arrive, initially being told they went to the wrong address. He told us he tried to contact the company to make sure they had his new details but was left on hold for hours.
Eventually, he says – a fortnight to go before his three month curfew ended – the tag was fitted.
When we tried to find out why it had taken so long, there were problems identified throughout the process.
Samuel was put on probation on March 14, but no specific instructions for the tag were sent from Probation to Serco for another two weeks.
Serco told us after that it did attempt to fit the tag three times, going 'above the requirements' of its contract, but he wasn't at the address Serco had been given. Serco said he was in breach of his conditions and this was reported to Probation.
Probation says from Serco's first visit on 11 April until 6 May, Samuel was deemed to have withdrawn his consent to be tagged, because he had been at the wrong address. They say he was told at a meeting on 15 April to return to his original address which he confirmed he had done at a meeting the following week.
Samuel says he had already notified the authorities about his change of address and had tried to contact both Serco and the Probation Service to ensure they had the correct one.
What is accepted is that Samuel remained untagged until May 23 – the vast majority of the time he was supposed to be being monitored.
We put his story and the whistleblower's claims to the National Chair of the Magistrates Association, Mark Beattie. He said: 'We tell an offender that the tag will be fitted in the next two days and the expectation is it's fitted in the next two days. We're very concerned about what we're hearing if we're now being told it's not being fitted for weeks, then you question whether tagging is an effective solution.'
Mr Beattie said tagging should be a useful tool to both punish the offender but also to protect the victims of crime. He said if they can't trust the process 'that's a disaster'.
'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.'
This is all a problem for the government itself. In an effort to relieve the prisons crisis , there will be more
community sentences
and a massive expansion of the tagging programme. It's expected tens of thousands more offenders will be tagged in the coming months.
Mark Beattie says if magistrates can't trust the system they will just send offenders to prison instead, defeating the government's plans to send fewer offenders to jail. He says before they expand the tagging programme there should be a complete review of how it's working.
'I think we need to understand the scale of the problem. If they can't deliver now what we have been ordering through the courts, then we have to understand what the recovery plan is. So at the point that it ramps up, we have to have confidence that they're going to be ready to deliver it.'
In a statement , Antony King, the Managing Director of Citizen Services at Serco, said: 'We are proud of the challenging work our people do, working with multiple partners across the criminal justice system in delivering an essential and critical public safety service, often with complex and ever increasing requirements. Our performance continues to improve, which the MoJ recognise, and we continue to monitor record numbers of people in the community supporting our colleagues in probation and the Home Office.'
The Ministry of Justice told us: 'While we cannot comment on individual cases, we dispute many of the claims being made. Tagging is an important and effective way to monitor and punish offenders and any delays are totally unacceptable.'
But it did add that while the backlog of tagging visits had been significantly reduced, Serco's overall performance 'remains below acceptable levels'.
Serco to repay £68m for wrongly billed electronic tagging
G4S and Serco face SFO 'criminal investigation' over tagging
Is electronic tagging too costly and out of date?

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Channel 4
7 hours ago
- Channel 4
TAGGING JACKIE
As the government gets ready to roll out a massive expansion of the offender tagging programme in England and Wales, a whistleblower from inside Serco, the private company charged with running it, has told Channel 4 News the system is in 'chaos' and could be putting the public at risk. The Serco insider works at the company's monitoring centre. We've called him Aaron to protect his identity. He told us at one point the computer system was throwing out so much data, finding genuine breaches was 'like finding a needle in a haystack'. 'It was throwing out all these alerts that sometimes didn't mean anything but there'd be thousands and thousands. We didn't know how to identify the genuine breaches from all this traffic of data that was coming into the system.' He also claimed some offenders are going unmonitored and the company only realises it after being asked for information from police or probation looking for them. 'We've had somebody who they want to arrest for rape or potential assault, a serious assault of a victim, and you'd look up the records to identify the person that they're asking about. There's been instances where we haven't been able to give them that information because something has gone wrong when it's been installed, or something's happened in the system where the person has got a tag on, but we're not actively monitoring them. There's been instances where it's been weeks and weeks of where we think we're monitoring someone but they're not actively being monitored.' Aaron described staff at the centre being asked by police for GPS location details of a tagged domestic abuse offender after his ex partner was found dead and he became a potential suspect. Aaron claims staff found he hadn't been monitored effectively 'due to an error.' Serco won the 200 million pound government contract back in 2023 and it came into operation in May the following year, but it's had a troubled history . The company has been fined for poor performance on the contract every month since it started. In April, failures in the tagging system were exposed by Channel 4's Dispatches programme, including offenders going untagged for weeks. In response, Serco said it was tagging a record number of people and its performance would continue to improve 'at pace.' But Channel 4 News has uncovered potential flaws across the entire system – not just with Serco. 'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.' Twenty one year old Samuel Mattocks was found by police with a knife in his bag. He was initially told to expect prison but, for his first offence, magistrates decided instead to give him a three month community sentence, a critical part of it being a tag to make sure he observed his curfew. He was told the tag would be fitted in two or three days. For weeks, Samuel says he waited for the tagging company to arrive, initially being told they went to the wrong address. He told us he tried to contact the company to make sure they had his new details but was left on hold for hours. Eventually, he says – a fortnight to go before his three month curfew ended – the tag was fitted. When we tried to find out why it had taken so long, there were problems identified throughout the process. Samuel was put on probation on March 14, but no specific instructions for the tag were sent from Probation to Serco for another two weeks. Serco told us after that it did attempt to fit the tag three times, going 'above the requirements' of its contract, but he wasn't at the address Serco had been given. Serco said he was in breach of his conditions and this was reported to Probation. Probation says from Serco's first visit on 11 April until 6 May, Samuel was deemed to have withdrawn his consent to be tagged, because he had been at the wrong address. They say he was told at a meeting on 15 April to return to his original address which he confirmed he had done at a meeting the following week. Samuel says he had already notified the authorities about his change of address and had tried to contact both Serco and the Probation Service to ensure they had the correct one. What is accepted is that Samuel remained untagged until May 23 – the vast majority of the time he was supposed to be being monitored. We put his story and the whistleblower's claims to the National Chair of the Magistrates Association, Mark Beattie. He said: 'We tell an offender that the tag will be fitted in the next two days and the expectation is it's fitted in the next two days. We're very concerned about what we're hearing if we're now being told it's not being fitted for weeks, then you question whether tagging is an effective solution.' Mr Beattie said tagging should be a useful tool to both punish the offender but also to protect the victims of crime. He said if they can't trust the process 'that's a disaster'. 'If I was a victim of domestic abuse, I would be extremely scared having been told that tagging is the solution to my safety and then to find it's not.' This is all a problem for the government itself. In an effort to relieve the prisons crisis , there will be more community sentences and a massive expansion of the tagging programme. It's expected tens of thousands more offenders will be tagged in the coming months. Mark Beattie says if magistrates can't trust the system they will just send offenders to prison instead, defeating the government's plans to send fewer offenders to jail. He says before they expand the tagging programme there should be a complete review of how it's working. 'I think we need to understand the scale of the problem. If they can't deliver now what we have been ordering through the courts, then we have to understand what the recovery plan is. So at the point that it ramps up, we have to have confidence that they're going to be ready to deliver it.' In a statement , Antony King, the Managing Director of Citizen Services at Serco, said: 'We are proud of the challenging work our people do, working with multiple partners across the criminal justice system in delivering an essential and critical public safety service, often with complex and ever increasing requirements. Our performance continues to improve, which the MoJ recognise, and we continue to monitor record numbers of people in the community supporting our colleagues in probation and the Home Office.' The Ministry of Justice told us: 'While we cannot comment on individual cases, we dispute many of the claims being made. Tagging is an important and effective way to monitor and punish offenders and any delays are totally unacceptable.' But it did add that while the backlog of tagging visits had been significantly reduced, Serco's overall performance 'remains below acceptable levels'. Serco to repay £68m for wrongly billed electronic tagging G4S and Serco face SFO 'criminal investigation' over tagging Is electronic tagging too costly and out of date?


BBC News
8 hours ago
- BBC News
Inspection finds high rates of violence at HMP Fosse Way
High rates of violence and "significant" drug use have been uncovered at a new prison in Leicestershire, inspectors at HMP Fosse Way in Glen Parva, Leicestershire, told His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) that they felt unsafe during an unannounced inspection in showed there had been a "steady rise" in violence at the prison which opened in 2023, over the 12 months before the inspection, with violence against staff also the inspection revealed "significant concerns" over safety, inspectors rated three other areas - respect, purposeful activity and preparation for release - as "reasonably good". The visit was the first review of the service - which is run privately by Serco - since it opened in 2023, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS). Inspectors said they found "illicit drugs" were "widely available" at the prison, and added it was a "threat to the stability" of the said such items were being brought in through the gate by staff or prisoners, or being thrown over the fence, but acknowledged that steps had been taken to crackdown on the report added that tackling the issues had been identified as "a priority" by prison leadership, but said that "not enough" was being done to address demand for drugs or provide support for those who engaged with substance misuseIt added that leaders had taken "decisive action" to deal with "staff corruption" with several members of staff "arrested or dismissed". 'Maintain the momentum' Some 42% of prisoners said they had experienced "bullying or victimisation" in the prison compared to 29% in similar were also about 360 new charges brought against prisoners each month, most of which were for possession of unauthorised articles, incidents of violence and positive drug test results, according to the said staff often "failed" to reinforce the standard of behaviour needed to make prisoners feel the prison was praised for the amount of time prisoners were able to be out of their cells, and the "wide range" of education, work and training opportunities was also praise for the range of activities available to inmates, and prisoners were encouraged to stay in touch with their families, the report added. Ultimately, inspectors said that leaders and staff "should be congratulated on what they had achieved so far" and "encouraged to maintain the momentum they have created".Wyn Jones, prison director for Serco, said the company was "overall pleased" with the said: "Our focus remains on ensuring our prison is safe and we have an action plan in place to improve this."This includes an accommodation strategy for prisoners who feel unsafe to move to quieter house blocks."Our zero-tolerance approach to drugs in the prison continues and our work with the police has led to a significant reduction in the availability of drugs within Fosse Way."


Scottish Sun
11 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
MMA fighter who starred in Channel 4 show is facing jail for a second time – after previously throttling ex
THUG SHAME MMA fighter who starred in Channel 4 show is facing jail for a second time – after previously throttling ex Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A THUG MMA fighter who starred in a Channel 4 show is facing jail for a second time after previously attacking his ex. Demornia Cantrill spoke about his upbringing in foster care on 2015 doc Kicked Out Kids. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 1 Demornia Cantrill has been jailed Credit: Cavendish He told the show: "I want to prove to everybody that says I'm just going to be a drug dealer or in prison - I want to prove them wrong and show that just because I had a s*** upbringing doesn't mean I can't change it." But Cantrill has now pleaded guilty to possessing class A diamorphone - a prescription only opiod - with intent to supply and possession of cannabis. The 28-year-old is now facing a prison sentence when he returns to court in July for sentencing. Cantrill was previously locked up in 2020 after he attacked his ex-girlfriend at her home. Tyra Campbell was left fearing for her life when she was choked until she could barely breathe. As she called 999, Cantrill chillingly told her: "Snitches get stitches". At time, he was subject to a community order over an attack on his own mum and an assault on police. Cantrill was placed into care as a baby but left aged 17 to become a MMA fighter. He also went into the army for two years and also worked as a teaching assistant. In the latest hearing at Plymouth Crown Court, Judge Robert Linford said he recognised Cantrill's name and remembered the TV programme about him. Cantrill told him he is a member of a boxing club in Manchester that is trying to teach kids to deal with problems in a "fist fight rather than with knives and guns". He has been remanded into custody ahead of sentencing.