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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Jessica Murray Social affairs correspondent

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

Security electronic tag attached to a person's ankle
The report said the tagging system was ‘performing poorly and failing to meet demand’. Photograph: Stocksolutions/Alamy

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.

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