Electronic Tagging: a Lucrative Business

In a dingy Indian jail cell forty-six years ago, Tom Stacey had an idea that would later develop into a billion-pound industry. The author and former Sunday Times foreign correspondent, jailed after crossing the government while working on a story, dreamt up an alternative to prison that he felt would be more humane: the electronic tag.

On his return to England he became a prison visitor and encouraged companies to create the device. He set up the non-profit Offender's Tag Association to lobby government and, after a short trial period and a flurry of controversy, electronic tagging was eventually introduced by New Labour in 1999.

In the first year 9000 tags were issued in England and Wales. This figure has steadily risen and to date more than 750,000 people have worn one. Between April 2010 – April 2011 alone 116,000 individuals were tagged, including over 6,000 young offenders, some as young as eleven. They are predominantly used to monitor prisoners released early on home detention curfews, but can also be issued as a community penalty.

The technology has attracted sustained criticism over the years, most notably from penal reform campaigners and probation officers who say it does not have any impact on reducing crime or reoffending rates. In September, however, justice secretary Ken Clarke revealed the coalition government was looking to further expand its use of tagging, inviting private companies to bid on over £1bn worth of contracts to provide the service.

For Stacey, who now spends his days working as a publisher based in west London, this was without doubt a positive move.

“It is clearly better than prison,” he says. “Prison is a pretty random and stupid way to handle people. It destroys the ability to get a job. It eliminates a person’s skills if they ever had any and it breaks up families if there ever was one.

“Prison is not just about depriving somebody of their liberty, it’s actually exposing them to all kinds of sustained abuse and fear … The tag is a much more humane alternative.”

Stacey, in fact, believes the government has not gone far enough. He wants to see it adopt high-tech, GPS satellite tracking tags – piloted by former home secretary David Blunkett in 2004 – which would monitor an offender’s every move.

“It’s highly unimaginative and timid of this government not to follow up on the initiative of David Blunkett on that pilot scheme,” he says.

The equipment used most commonly in England and Wales is less advanced, consisting of a tag, worn round the ankle or wrist, and a monitoring unit based usually in the home. Using a radio signal like a mobile phone, the tag acts as a transmitter that communicates with the monitoring unit, which in turn updates authorities, ensuring the offender does not breach their curfew by leaving home during a set period, though not monitoring their exact movements.

Part of the reason tags have proved popular with government is financial. It costs £1,063 to tag an adult for 90-days, which is over £5,000 less than the average cost of imprisoning a person for the same length of time. But despite the saving, according to critics including Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, tags are not value for money because there is little evidence that they reduce crime.

“Putting people on a tag does nothing to address the causes of crime and has no long-term impact on offending,” she says. “In a recent investigation into the use of tag on young people, many of the people we spoke to explained the dehumanising effects of being placed on tag. One young person described it ‘like being on a dog chain’. Others felt that it actually exacerbated the chances that they would be breached and returned to prison due to the amount of frustration it caused.”

Campaign groups have also expressed concern that under new government plans, the length of a curfew could be raised from its current twelve-hour-a-day maximum to 16 hours, and the order doubled in duration, from six months to twelve.

“Being confined can affect rehabilitation into the community, depending on the number of hours per day,” says Sally Ireland, a policy director for human rights organisation Justice.

“At 16 hours it really starts affecting employment, education and other opportunities to undertake meaningful activity. There should be a rational connection between the offending and the curfew, and it should be proportionate. It shouldn’t just be used as a form of house arrest or a way of putting somebody in custody harshly.”

Advocates of the tag argue that it can provide order and stability to sometimes chaotic lives, allowing an offender to reintegrate into society after committing a crime. However one former Birmingham University student, convicted of an offence midway through a computer science degree, told The Big Issue in the North being tagged for a four month period after an early release from prison had a negative effect on his education.

“I couldn’t go in to the [university] labs to use specialist software because of tag,” said the 29-year-old, who asked to remain anonymous. “It impacted my coursework without doubt. It wasn’t ideal and I did get special understanding from the university. They accepted that I couldn’t work for four and a half months because of the tag, but it did restrict me.”

In recent months tags have attracted negative publicity after being imposed for minor offences. In March a 66-year-old great grandmother from Sale was tagged after selling a goldfish to a 14-year-old boy (an animal welfare law passed in 2006 made it illegal to sell goldfish to under 16s). And it was reported in July that a 71-year-old woman from Hattersley was tagged for three months after refusing to have her sick dog put down.

Stacey concedes that “there will always be bizarre instances” and “eccentric judges” who impose an electronic tag in questionable circumstances. But he remains firm in his conviction that the technology will always be a better alternative to prison.

“Tagging is not a massive shock to the system,” he says. “Banging somebody up in prison is completely alarming and heaven knows what sort of consequences it could have.

“Magistrates don’t like sending people to jail … But if they’re not allowed to put them on the tag they won’t have a choice. Just ask a person: would you rather be on the tag or in prison? There’s only one answer you’ll get to that.”

This article first appeared in issue #897 of The Big Issue in the North magazine.

Outsourcing Accountability: Privatisation and Freedom of Information

Since it was introduced in 2005, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has helped expose a wide range of scandals. It has uncovered MPs exploiting their taxpayer-funded expenses system, child abuse in Northern Ireland as well as the scale of civilian deaths in the Afghan war. The Act, which is based upon the principle that the public has a “right to know” information contained in government records, has become an important means by which power can be held to account.

But freedom of information as we know it could be under serious threat. In towns and cities across the country, there are rapid, expansive changes taking place. As the government implements the biggest public spending cuts in a generation, many public services are struggling to survive. From Manchester to Devon, libraries, care homes, schools and even hospital wards are faced with a very real prospect of closure. What this means is that, almost inevitably, we are set to see control and ownership of public services being handed over to the private sector on an unprecedented scale.

The FOIA, in its current form, can only be used to gain information from public bodies “wholly funded” by public money, such as the police force or local councils. Private companies not owned by public money, even if they are providing key public services such as care provision, are not bound by the Act. Therefore, as more and more of our services become privatised, freedom of information is likely to diminish.

According to freedom of information campaigner, author and journalist Heather Brooke, this poses a serious problem for the future.

“We’re going to see increasing privatisation of what were public services, and there is a danger that because they’ll be privatised they won’t have the same accountability that they had when they were overseen by public bodies,” she says. “In principle I don’t have a problem with privatisation; my problem is when public money or policymaking or public decisions are outsourced, there’s no way for the public to hold that to account.”

The coalition government expects that as the public sector slowly disappears and the state shrinks, privately owned companies will step in to fill the void. Journalists and citizens will still be able to request information about specific private contracts if they have been paid for by a public body – such as when a council contracts a private company to provide a service – but they cannot make direct FOI requests to the company or ask for information relating to any other matters. The implications of this are potentially huge.

“It is a matter of concern where functions are being removed from public authorities to private contractors,” says Maurice Frankel, director of the long running UK Campaign for Freedom of Information. “A vast range of information is going to be lost from public access.”

Frankel predicts that if the coalition’s plans to privatise elements of the NHS go ahead, GPs will have a right to access only partial information about the performance of contracted private healthcare providers. “If you want to know how many cases of reinfection occurred in the hospital, that’s not going to be covered by the individual GP’s contract,” he says. “The solution is to make the contractors themselves public authorities under the [FOI] Act.“

Across the housing sector, similar changes have already taken place. Private companies are now responsible for building most of the UK’s “affordable homes” – a role that up until the Thatcher era was carried out predominantly by councils using public funds. Often councils will now contract private developers as part of regeneration projects. Consequently, there has been a direct impact on transparency and accountability.

Researching a story on a regeneration project in New Broughton, Salford for Big Issue in the North earlier this year, I encountered firsthand the impact of privatisation on freedom of information. After a significant statistic was quoted to me by a public relations (PR) firm employed by private developer Countryside Properties, I asked to see its origin. Following a lengthy exchange of emails, however, my request was refused. The survey was “confidential and not in the public domain,” I was told. The PR firm would allow me to see snippets of the survey, but not the full thing; they wanted to reveal the favourable statistics, but nothing else.

The government’s plans to create new ‘free schools’ – schools that can be started by businesses, parents, teachers or other groups – have also caused transparency concerns.

Jane Eades, treasurer of campaign group the Anti-Academies Alliance, was refused information about free schools after submitting an FOI request to the Department for Education last year.She believes part of the problem is that a charity called the New Schools Network (NSN) has been set up to help fund free schools. The NSN has received £500,000 from the government, and anyone wishing to set up a school can apply to it for funding. But as it is a charity, it is exempt from the FOIA.

“The Government have been very cunning in the way they have set up the free schools process,” Eades says. “Unless the group [the NSA] publicise what they are doing, there is no local consultation or information. In other words, the whole deal seems to be very secretive.”

Such instances could become commonplace if privatisation is to spread across the public sector. Yet prime minister David Cameron maintains that the coalition government aspires to become “one of the most transparent governments in the world”. In recent weeks, for instance, the government has revealed plans to somewhat strengthen and widen the powers of the FOIA. Under the changes proposed in the new Protection of Freedoms Bill, some organisations previously exempt from freedom of information requests would be included. Bodies performing “functions of a public nature” such as the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Advertising Standards Authority are among those who would be made to adhere to FOI legislation.

Freedom of information campaigners have welcomed these changes; however, although the Freedoms Bill widens the scope of the FOIA, it still fails to address the issue of privatisation. While on the one hand the government is strengthening the ability of citizens to gain information from public bodies, on the other, by privatising public services, they are reducing the amount of information that is freely available. Whether intentionally or not, the coalition is outsourcing accountability.

According to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the arm of government responsible for freedom of information policy, the FOIA will soon be reviewed to ensure it remains an effective means by which people hold the government to account. But the speed and scale of the government’s rapidly implemented privatisation agenda seems to have already caught the MoJ off-guard.

When questioned about the potentially regressive impact of privatisation on freedom of information, an MoJ spokesperson responded: “We have to strike a balance between our commitment to increasing transparency and that of reducing the regulatory burden on business. We do not consider it necessary to extend the Act to bodies that provide public services under contract at present.”

Meanwhile, the Information Commissioners Office – the independent authority set up to “uphold information rights in the public interest” – pointed to a statement made by Commissioner Christopher Graham in January.

“It would be perverse if by going for alternative provision of services – privatisation, contracting out, looking at new and imaginative alternative ways of delivering public services – we suddenly found that we are giving important public functions to authorities that are not within the FOI Act and they became less accountable," Graham said in an interview with the Guardian newspaper. “We've got to think through the implications; we can't be so starry-eyed that we can't see the downside. There is a potential for services to become less transparent and less accountable.”

For Brooke, who won a landmark High Court judgement in 2008 forcing the disclosure of MPs expenses, the only real solution is to expand the provisions of the FOIA further. “What I would like to see is a change in the Freedom of Information Act,” she says.

“A better situation would be if it was about the criteria, about how much funding does that organisation receive from the public or are they providing a public service. If they are doing one of those two things then they should fall under the purview of being a public body for the purposes of the FOIA. We’ve definitely got to see some kind of change to the law."

This article appeared originally in Issue No.871 of Big Issue in the North.