Crime and Courts Act 2013 (Commencement No. 18) Order 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-11-21
Topic: Law and Crime
Charlotte Vere (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. As I explained in my opening remarks, the technology we are talking about is GPS tracking. Yes, it is used in black boxes. My son has one in his car, so he does not do naughty things on the road—which is superb—and we all have it in our telephones. If the noble Lord is asking whether the technology has been tested, I think we can say that it certainly has. Indeed, it is probably used by most of us on a daily basis as we make our way around in the world using Google Maps. More specifically, the partners in place that will be building up the service providers all have great experience in this area. For example, mapping the data from the tags will be done by Airbus—which I think probably knows a fair amount about where things are, particularly aeroplanes in the sky. Of course we are confident that the technology works, and I believe that the pilot has made us confident that the application of it for this particular group of people is a good thing The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, commented on the timing of the publication of the report. I am now in two minds about why I shared that anyway. I did it to put noble Lords’ minds at rest, because the responses from the pilot were, as we have heard, fairly positive. I cannot give the noble Lord a date for publication, but it will be very soon. That is how all this has fitted together As for the timing of the SI, noble Lords discussed this in the Moses Room many months ago, and one of the reasons for the timing relates to an issue that was raised slightly later, about engaging with stakeholders. How can we ensure that this system is actually used by the people who we need to be able to step up and tell them, "You can have a tag, because we can trust you to go into the community, provided that you do certain things"? We have found that, the more we can engage with the people within the criminal justice system who will make those orders, the more likely they are to use the tag. That is why we wanted to get the timing of the SI done, so that we could engage with stakeholders The noble Lord also mentioned charging. I think that I too mentioned that in my opening remarks. It takes one hour a day, and—to be a bit brutal—it is slightly better than being in custody to have to sit down somewhere and charge a tag. There is also the portable battery charger; I talked about that too. So I do not believe this is a huge issue. The design, too, is much better. We have all seen that the size of these things has now come right down to an insignificant size that will go under a sock, which is very good As for resourcing, the cost of monitoring has been brought down significantly by technology—and on the flip side, there are benefits. The cost of investigations could be lower for the police as they look for people they want to rule in or out of possible criminality I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, about G4S. I will write to him and set out what happened with G4S in the past, but I reassure him that we have run a fully compliant, open and competitive bidding process for all service providers. There is no scope to exclude bidders within this system, even if they are subject to an ongoing investigation. I recognise the noble Lord’s concerns. We are obviously keeping things under a careful, watchful eye, but we are pleased with the service providers we have Finally, on reporting, there are no specific plans to publish an individual report on the effectiveness of the new service, but the ministry will monitor take-up and effectiveness as part of the benefits realisation and will also report on the service providers’ performance. I am sure the noble Lord will find that very interesting. It will report on their performance against service level agreements and the number of orders being managed as part of wider regular offender management publications. I think noble Lords will see the numbers, there will be commentary about how well the service is working and there will be the results of the longer-term pilot by MOPAC in due course.