Our national chair Mark Beattie talked to Channel 4 News about our concerns around tagging, as their report raises serious questions about its effective implementation. Have a read and watch here: https://www.channel4.com/news/tagging-jackie
You can read the Magistrates’ Association’s full statement below:
“Magistrates need confidence in non-custodial options like tagging. However recent reports raise serious questions about their effective implementation.
“If an offender is not being tagged quickly enough, if an offender is not where they say they are going to be, and if there are no timely consequences, how can magistrates and victims have confidence in the tagging system? This is especially concerning in domestic abuse cases where protecting victims is at the forefront of magistrates’ minds.
“Community sentences have huge potential, and there are calls for them to be used more, including in the Independent Sentencing Review. We support those calls. But systemic failures like this risk undermining both their effectiveness and magistrates’ confidence in using them.
“We urgently need clarity on the scale of the problem and reassurance that the tagging failures exposed recently will be fixed. We are calling on the government to undertake a comprehensive review of tagging, so that there is a full understanding of the current situation, what the weaknesses in the system are, and what is going to be done to improve the situation before they expand the tagging programme”.
