a day ago
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'.
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