Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what progress has been made on electronic monitoring.

This Government is committed to developing a new generation of electronic monitoring tags, so that we can more effectively monitor the location of offenders.

But there have been significant problems with this programme. We have not developed the infrastructure for these new electronic monitoring tags to the timetable originally set out nor yet at the level of effectiveness required. Integrating legacy technology on the new system has caused particular delays.

We are now in the the process of testing the new tags. But the new fully integrated service will not be ready for another 12 months at the earliest. We continue to use existing tags for a variety of offenders.