Failure to fit tags left 5,000 offenders unmonitored in England and Wales, report finds

More than 5,000 offenders went unmonitored in the first half of the year because probation staff failed to install electronic tags, while 1,600 tags had no signal for more than two weeks due to faults, a report has found.The Institute for Government (IfG) has revealed the full scale of the crisis in the probation system in England and Wales, concluding that “rationing probation supervision” due to a lack of staff meant sentences imposed by the court had become “essentially a fiction” for most offenders.Once the 2026 Sentencing Act – which reduces the release point for many sentences – is fully implemented, most offenders will spend the final third of their sentence on licence without any active supervision, the report said.“This risks further undermining public trust in the criminal justice system and making sentences even more convoluted and opaque, including to victims,” the report by the independent thinktank found.Cassia Rowland, the associate director at the institute and author of the report, said: “It’s hard to set out just how demoralised and unhappy a lot of probation staff are. They feel everything is really chaotic, all of these changes are being flung on to them, they’re worried about their personal safety and the public protection risk of the people they’re managing.”She added: “The sentences courts are imposing are having less and less relevance to the time people are actually serving. The situation we’ve reached now is if you get given a six-year sentence, you’re most likely going to be spending two years in prison, two years on probation and then two years with conditions that no one is monitoring or enforcing. That’s just not a six-year sentence.”The report’s most scathing criticisms of the Probation Service included the electronic tagging of offenders, which the report found was “performing poorly and failing to meet demand”.Between January and April, more than 5,000 people who should have been monitored were not tagged, equating to 15% of all people with an electronic tagging order.Almost 1,600 people were wearing a tag that did not send a signal to the monitoring system for two weeks due to technical faults or the device not being charged.The report highlighted how issues of this kind meant that not a single probation delivery unit inspected in 2024 or 2025 received a rating above “requires improvement”, and two-thirds were rated “inadequate”.Offenders leaving HMP Brixton as part of the early release scheme on 1 October. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty ImagesThe report, based on public data and interviews with frontline staff, found as well as the increased risk to public safety, prisoners were also being let down, with little action taken to reduce reoffending rates.“People have told me stories of referring prisoners on to substance misuse programmes and their sentence ends before they reach the front of the waiting list. The system is not functioning to try to help people,” Rowland said.The report urged the government to increase the number of probation workers at a steady pace, and reintroduce home detention to help manage the prison population.It also called for a sentencing model that is “transparent and understandable”, and which explicitly sets out time in prison and time supervised in the community, with no licence periods without supervision.The report praised Keir Starmer’s government for taking steps to stabilise the prison population, but said this work may have been “undone” by Andy Burnham, who announced a number of exemptions to the early release scheme after public backlash.At the start of October, the first 700 of an expected 4,500 criminals were released early from prison as part of emergency measures brought in with facilities just months away from reaching maximum capacity.Some said they expected to quickly return to prison as they had nowhere to live and would breach their licence conditions. The IfG report said administrative recalls for issues not relating to a new offence had “skyrocketed” in recent years.The government said all released offenders would be subject to strict monitoring, including the expansion of electronic tagging, but significant concerns have been raised about whether the overstretched Probation Service will be able to cope.“Tagging more people is also likely to substantially increase the workload for probation practitioners, when they are already short-staffed and struggling,” the report found.Rowland said: “This absolutely raises alarm bells. It’s very frustrating because victims are being made promises which potentially the system can’t meet.”A government spokesperson said: “We inherited a justice system in crisis after years of underinvestment and are taking the steps needed to fix it. This government is overseeing the biggest ever expansion of electronic monitoring in British history, making record investment into the Probation Service and community punishment, and recruiting thousands of new probation officers.“We are pulling every lever to better protect victims and tagging is just one tool we use to keep the public safe. Offenders can face being housed in approved premises, curfews, mandatory meeting with probation officers, no contact orders, requirements on where to live and the threat of immediate recall to prison.”