Justice Secretary admits number of convicts being tagged before leaving prison is ‘not where we want it to be’ despite hundreds being freed early under Labour’s release scheme

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Justice Secretary Alex Norris has acknowledged that too few prisoners are having electronic tags fitted before they leave jail, as the government expands its early release scheme to ease overcrowding. Giving evidence to a House of Lords committee, he said performance was improving but remained below the level ministers wanted. A tagging requirement, he accepted, has little practical effect until the device is fitted. He said fitting tags before release was preferable and that the government intended to do more of it.

The admission followed questions from Conservative peer Baroness Buscombe about prisoners who are given appointments to have tags fitted days or weeks after release. Citing a probation inspection report, she said some could not subsequently be found by probation officers. She argued that a pilot programme to fit tags before prisoners leave should become standard practice for those released on licence, and raised concerns about risks to the public and the information available to victims. Electronic tags can help authorities check compliance with conditions such as curfews and restrictions on where a person may go, but a delay in fitting one leaves a gap in that monitoring.

The wider release programme has also prompted concern from police and probation staff. Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Sir Stephen Watson said that 22 per cent of offenders released early in his area the previous month had reoffended within a month. That figure describes a local group over a short period; it does not establish the rate for everyone released under the scheme. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley has separately said his officers were arresting two or three people a week who had been freed through the programme. Ben Cockburn, of the probation union Napo, told peers that the rollout had placed heavy demands on staff, citing workloads, training and the volume of new guidance.

The second report says a further 650 prisoners were released in the latest phase, bringing its stated total since 1 October to at least 1,350. It describes the scheme as allowing eligible prisoners to leave after serving a third of their sentence in custody rather than half, with later phases extending eligibility to people given longer sentences. Both reports describe young men leaving HMP Holme House and celebrating their release, although those individual scenes do not show how the scheme is working overall. Ministers say expanded tagging and other measures are intended to protect the public. The questions raised before peers concern whether those measures can be put in place quickly and consistently enough as releases continue.

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