My Lords, I suggest that it is unwise to introduce this commencement order before the result of the pilots is known. I gather from what the Minister just said that the first pilot ended in March but its findings will not be available until the summer and that there is still a pilot operating within the City of London.
We are familiar with electronic monitoring. It has been used to date to ensure compliance by an offender with the terms of a community order, a suspended sentence or a licence to enable a prisoner to be released. Standalone monitoring of this sort is a significant step further. The proposal is to use GPS tracking to monitor an individual’s movements, not against the prohibitions that will be set out in a court order or on release on parole, but generally. It is therefore highly intrusive,
as I think the Minister acknowledged in what she said. It goes beyond what is necessary for rehabilitation or the protection of the public.
That point is perhaps emphasised even more by what we were told: that the monitoring will not be in real time—I think I understood that—but be retrospective. In other words, it is not an immediate form of surveillance but means that a probation officer will look back to see what his client has been doing rather than keep a watch over him. It is perhaps less objectionable if it is not immediate surveillance, but it may be rather more effective to use the resources that will be involved in this new system for rehabilitation rather than for tracking offenders in this way.
If this statutory instrument were brought forward after completion, evaluation and publication of the pilot projects—because we have no idea of the results of those pilot projects—it would be possible to assess whether the right balance has been struck. What are the Government going to do to bring those results before Parliament and give us notice of them? Will they give an undertaking not to seek the approval of both Houses before that is done? Otherwise we are faced with the verdict first and the trial afterwards. We want to know what the trial says so that we can comment on it and see whether this statutory instrument should be opposed when it is brought before the House.