Offenders: Electronic Tagging

The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) Major Projects Annual Report 2025-26 set out plans for the Electronic Monitoring Expansion Programme to expand the impact, use and efficiency of electronic monitoring as a tool for the management of offenders in the community, helping reduce re-offending and protecting the public. This programme included among other things the introduction of alcohol tagging, a new approach to Domestic Abuse Perpetrators on Licence and the Acquisitive Crime project.

NISTA’s report also sets out aims to retender the Electronic Monitoring Service, which has since been delivered. The legacy contract extensions were aligned to the Electronic Monitoring expansion programme, which has since completed, with various elements moving into national rollout or with plans to do so. As the Field and Monitoring Services and Monitoring Device and System Services contracts are now live and the implementation has concluded, the legacy contracts have all now ceased.

The latest figures on the number of individuals with Electronic Monitoring (EM) equipment (from June 2025 to June 2026) can be found here: Electronic Monitoring Statistics Publication, June 2026 - GOV.UK. Please note that EM statistics presented in this release are not directly comparable with those published before June 2025. This is due to changes in both the definition (from ‘tagged’ to ‘assigned with EM equipment’) and methodology used to classify individuals.

Publication of EM statistics was paused between June 2024 and June 2025 following the contract transition from Capita to Serco. This enabled statistical processes to be adapted for the new data source and provided time to assess data quality and accuracy. The latest published EM statistics pre-June 2025 can be found here, which show time series data from March 2017 to June 2024: Electronic Monitoring Statistics Publication, June 2024 - GOV.UK.