Justice 2 Committee, 09 Oct 2002
Meeting date: Wednesday, October 9, 2002
Official Report
180KB pdf
Scottish Parliament Justice 2 Committee Wednesday 9 October 2002 (Morning)
[The Convener opened the meeting at 09:50]
Good morning. I welcome everyone to the 35th meeting in 2002 of the Justice 2 Committee. I ask members to do the usual and switch off mobile phones and anything else that is likely to disrupt the meeting.
There is only one item as part of the convener's report. Bill Aitken, the deputy convener, and I visited Reliance Monitoring Services on Monday. For the committee's benefit, Bill will say a few words about the usefulness of that visit.
I agree that the visit was useful, in that it gave us an opportunity to study the technology involved, to speak to those who run Reliance Monitoring and to carry out an initial review of the operation of the tagging process.
I was extremely impressed with the technology, which seemed both discreet and effective. The problems with it have been limited, which I found encouraging. As members know, the Executive rolled out a couple of pilot projects, one of which was based at Hamilton sheriff court. My recollection is that the liberty of about 69 offenders has been restricted for varying periods and the compliance rate has been high.
The technology is such that Reliance Monitoring can tell when the conditions of the order have been breached to the smallest extent. A degree of slippage has been built into the system, in that an offender is allowed to be up to a total of 90 minutes late, spread over the tagging sentence. However, if he goes over that 90 minutes, he will be reported for breaching his order. Reports are made for every significant incident of lateness.
When an offender is in breach of their order, Reliance Monitoring notifies the sheriff clerk at the relevant court within two working days, which is perfectly satisfactory. However, there has been a problem with the system, as it was taking about six weeks for offenders to be returned to Hamilton sheriff court to face the sheriff and explain the breach. In some cases, by the time the sheriff had dealt with the offender, the sentence—that is, the order—had been completed. In those cases, the offender was given a financial penalty. If the system is to work, there must be a built-in procedure in which those who are in breach are brought before the court within a much tighter time scale. Otherwise, word will get out and the system will break down altogether.
As I said, I was somewhat encouraged by the visit. The technology was extremely impressive and seems to have worked thus far. However, these are early days, given the number of cases in the prosecution pipeline and the fact that the experiment has been of short duration. The jury is out on how effective the system will be over time.
We will get a report on our visit, which I am sure members will find useful, given that the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Bill proposes an extension of electronic tagging. We must examine that issue in more detail and the report will give us an opportunity to do so. The visit to the centre alerted me to the fact that we must consider which offences tagging should be used for and whether we should restrict the type of offender involved. The full report will be available before stage 2 of the bill.
As there are no questions, we will move to agenda item 1.