Criminals are going months without being tagged as prisons face a backlog after Labour’s early release scheme, it was reported tonight.
One burglar was found to have waited 78 days to be given his GPS tag, despite the Government saying all 3,100 prisoners let out under the scheme last year were tagged within 53 days.
In October, soon after prisoners were released to ease overcrowded jails, the tagging backlog had reached 4,726 cases, according to freedom of information requests.
Officials said this figure was not reflective of the ‘much lower’ daily average.
An investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches also found that a murderer had been walking around untagged for at least two months after he said his legs were too swollen to fit the monitor.
And another criminal allegedly removed her tag to party on holiday and boasted to her 200,000 TikTok followers, having failed to respond to visits.
The discoveries were made on Teesside – which has the highest violent crime rate across the country – by an undercover reporter who infiltrated the Electronic Monitoring Service (EMS).
In one video she filmed, a trainer said outsourcing giant Serco – EMS’s management who were awarded a £51million-a-year contract with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) last May – were ‘cutting corners at every possible point’, although this was denied by officials.
The reporter, Lucy Richards, said ‘criminals were running the show’ because they could simply decide not to answer the door, despite Serco’s policy to raise a breach if they could not tag an offender after two visits to their address.
Josh Babarinde, a Liberal Democrat MP, told The Times the system was ‘a complete failure’ and that he would push the justice committee to launch an inquiry.
The MoJ said Serco’s performance had been ‘unacceptable’, adding: ‘We will hold Serco to account with financial penalties should our expectations not be met.’
Serco boss Anthony Kirby said: ‘We acknowledge the responsibility we have to get it right. We are tagging a record number of people.’