The growth of electronic monitoring

Curfew Monitoring (RF)

RF gadgets permit the monitoring of a curfew, the place an offender have to be at a specified location at specified instances

The overall variety of people fitted with an digital monitoring system and whose main order was a curfew order as at 02 June 2025 was 8,125.

Court docket bail RF orders make up the biggest proportion (49%) of RF monitored people. At 02 June 2025, 3,950 people had RF courtroom bail as their main order kind.

Publish-release RF orders have been the second-largest group, with 3,001 people (37% of the RF caseload).

Court docket sentence RF orders (group orders and suspended sentence orders) have been the third-largest group with 1,174 people (14% of the caseload).

Alcohol Monitoring

There are two forms of alcohol monitoring:

Alcohol Abstinence and Monitoring Requirement (AAMR) – this may occasionally solely be used when sentencing for alcohol-related felony behaviour and it imposes a complete ban on ingesting alcohol for as much as 120 days. Compliance with the ban is monitored electronically utilizing an alcohol monitoring system, which displays for the consumption of alcohol through an offender’s sweat. An AAMR can solely be imposed if the person will not be alcohol dependent or has an Alcohol Remedy Requirement (ATR), and the person is an grownup (18 years or over).

Alcohol Monitoring on Licence (AML) – that is a further licence situation for offenders launched from custody whose offending and danger is alcohol associated. There are two licence situations out there, complete abstinence from alcohol, or a requirement that the offender complies with necessities specified by their probation practitioner to handle their alcohol wants, which can embrace limiting alcohol use.

The overall variety of people fitted with an alcohol monitoring system as at 02 June 2025 was 4,261. It is a substantial improve on three years in the past when there have been lower than one thousand folks topic to this type of EM.

Digital monitoring utilizing a non-fitted system was launched in November 2022 for the immigration cohort. These gadgets utilise periodic biometric verification as an alternative choice to fitted gadgets. People with a non-fitted system are included inside this GPS cohort on this MoJ statistical bulletin.

Sadly, I can’t give clear figures on the traits in use of different types of EM. It is because Serco took over the supply of the service from Capita in Could 2024 and from that date to 2 June 2025 some folks have been counted as being on a tag in each Serco and Capita programs making it inconceivable to dependable calculate the numbers on several types of tag at completely different dates. 

Nonetheless, it’s clear that the general pattern is upwards and that this pattern is prone to speed up over the course of this Authorities.

Due to Andy Aitchison for sort permission to make use of the header picture on this publish. You’ll be able to see Andy’s work right here