Metropolitan Police officers will no longer turn out to some minor electronic tagging breaches under a pilot scheme that runs until spring, as the force tries to pull hours of officer time away from low-level incidents and back towards work that protects the public.
The change covers short-term curfew breaches and tag battery failures for people on court bail. Officers will still look at every case, but they will only consider arrest where there are risk or safeguarding concerns. High-risk offenders, including domestic abusers, will continue to be prioritised, and anyone thought to pose a specific risk to the public will still get a response.
The scale of the current workload explains why the force is acting. It deals with more than 100 tagging breaches each day, and a large number of those are described as low-level, rarely ending in action through the courts. A spokesperson for the force said tying up several officers for hours on such cases is not the best use of resources, giving two examples: offenders who have briefly stepped outside for a cigarette, and cases where police are told 19 hours later that someone was 15 minutes late returning home.
A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said: “We understand the pressures across the criminal justice system. To best protect the public, those pressures cannot always fall on policing and certainly not without prioritisation. Where there is a risk to the public, particularly if someone is breaching conditions designed to protect a victim, we will absolutely respond.”
The pilot is deliberately narrow. It applies only to individuals on court bail, and it does not mean breaches are ignored. Each case will still be reviewed, with arrest remaining an option where risk or safeguarding concerns emerge. The distinction the force is drawing is between a breach that signals danger and one that, on the facts, does not.
That distinction matters because of what currently happens after an arrest. Earlier this month, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley highlighted the lack of consequences for most breaches, saying: “95 per cent-plus of the tagging breaches that we arrest are simply being bailed back into the community on the same condition, so there is zero sanction.” The force is working with partners to find more effective penalties, so that police time spent on breaches leads somewhere rather than back to the same conditions.
For frontline policing, the arithmetic is stark. More than 100 breaches a day, each capable of tying up several officers for hours, adds up to a large block of duty time spent on incidents that, in the force’s own assessment, rarely reach a courtroom. Moving that time towards neighbourhood work, victim protection and higher-risk cases is the stated aim of the pilot, rather than a decision to stop caring about compliance.
The Government, responding to the change, pointed to wider investment in policing and offender management. A Government spokesperson said: “We inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse. If we had failed to act, the police would have been forced to halt arrests, putting communities at untold risk. That is why we are putting thousands more neighbourhood police officers onto our streets, upping police funding to £18.5 billion and taking investment in the probation service to record levels. To manage offenders out on licence, we are rolling out the toughest-ever controls, including world-first restriction zones, the largest expansion of electronic tagging, and giving victims a say in licence conditions.”
Electronic tagging sits at the centre of that wider system. It is used to monitor people on bail and on licence, with curfews and exclusion conditions designed to protect victims and keep track of offenders in the community. When the technology flags a breach, the question for police has always been how seriously to treat it — and the pilot is an attempt to answer that question with risk, rather than with an automatic response.
The scheme will run until spring. What happens after that will depend on whether the force and its partners judge that the new approach has protected the public while freeing up officer time, and whether the more effective penalties now being worked on give breaches consequences that the current system, on Rowley’s figures, largely does not. For now, the message to the public is that a breach involving risk will still be met with a response, while a brief, low-level lapse will be reviewed rather than automatically attended.
Londoners will feel the effects, if at all, in the way police time is used rather than in any visible change on the street. The pilot does not change the law on bail conditions, and it does not remove the tag from anyone’s ankle. It changes only which breaches send officers out of the station — and, the force hopes, what those officers are free to do instead.
Related coverage on London Streets includes the suspended sentence handed to Chris Brown at Southwark Crown Court, the arrest after a stabbing at Brixton station, and the not guilty plea entered by a Crystal Palace woman over the RAF Brize Norton case.
