Understanding that the proposed Sentencing Bill includes plans to increase the utilisation of Electronic Monitoring of offenders gives this author a feeling of déjà vu.
This supposed silver bullet gets wheeled out every time a government is trying to find a cheap solution to historic under-investment in the criminal justice system. I think this feeling may be mirrored in The House of Lords’ inquiry into the use of Electronic Monitoring (EM).
On 5 November, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee chair, Lord Forster, wrote to the MoJ and Home Office listing multiple points of failure in the current EM system and making a long list of recommendations – with the implication that these should be addressed before the EM system is further expanded.
For those who have long-term experience of the EM method of offender control, many of the issues listed in that letter have been known about for a long time. For me, writing as a procurement professional, the three biggest areas of concern are:
- The failure of the MoJ to disengage itself from a number of discredited suppliers whose misdeeds have been well known since 2012, and who would probably have found themselves barred from providing contracts to any UK-based Authority under different circumstances.
- The failure to deliver any technological advances, and therefore any new answers, to the problems associated with GPS and RF technology. These problems have been recognised for a long time, and have stymied further adaption of EM tag use since before Lord Cameron was Prime Minister.
- The fact that no new procurement activity to counter the above has been attempted since 2011. The Serious Fraud Office inquiry and subsequent court cases will have slowed this down. My suspicion also is that the MoJ had its fingers so badly burnt by at least two very expensive and failed attempts to reprocure this service, that they simply gave up.
Perhaps the potential rapid increase in expenditure proposed by the Sentencing Bill does open an opportunity to break down the duopoly of EM equipment suppliers, although as initially stated I have heard this one before.
From a procurement perspective, I think several steps are needed to deliver the outcome so long desired.
First, the Government needs to properly and comprehensively assess what it actually wants to achieve through the use of EM monitoring. Critical to this would be the development of a market-assessed specification, that is developed through a solid understanding of the capabilities and limitations of both current technology and the legal framework it operates in.
Second, a commitment to avoid being derailed by political ambition or the ‘fairy stories’ of potential suppliers. This means having a procurement strategy informed by practical, technological and legal reality. It also means honestly expressing what we don’t know, and what process we need to investigate further before attempting to engage with the marketplace.
Perhaps the innovative procurement possibilities that were implied by the Procurement Act 2023, could facilitate a more informed and viable process of obtaining truth from the market. This still remains to be tested.
Finally – although I risk falling into the trap of believing AI can solve all our problems – the MoJ must have a hard look at AI’s use in the electronic monitoring of offenders. I believe AI has the potential to resolve a number of the problems associated with EM: the issues related to response times, and assessing the location of an offender when there is only limited and fragmented data. AI might also significantly reduce the very high costs associated with the monitoring process, which currently is highly dependent on the availability of trained staff 24 hours per day.
It would be useful to understand however, what a Court might make of evidence collected and inferred by artificial intelligence.
The use of AI potentially opens up the EM procurement project to a different group of suppliers who may have not yet had contact with this supply chain, but who might be able to provide some of the answers long sought as well as potentially breaking up the technological stranglehold which is currently held by a very limited and somewhat discredited supply base.
