Britain is investing in 30,000 more electronic tags for criminals as part of a massive overhaul in sentencing law.
The huge expansion of tagging technology will see nearly 40,000 criminals electronically monitored at once.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is understood to have secured £700 million in funding from the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to buy the devices.
This will increase the Probation Service’s budget by roughly a third and enable it to quadruple the number of criminals fitted with electronic tags, The Times reports.
It comes as David Gauke, the former Conservative justice secretary, will publish a long-awaited sentencing review this month.
The report is expected to lead to the most drastic shake-up of sentencing legislation in decades and, the government is predicted to accept most of his recommendations.
A MoJ spokesman said last week: ‘This Government inherited a justice system in crisis, with prisons days from collapse.
‘David Gauke is conducting a sentencing review to ensure that we never run out of prison places again, and we are committed to reforming sentencing to ensure our prisons cut crime and keep the public safe.’
The Ministry of Justice is also thought to be preparing to announce a new type of tag that will measure the level of drugs in an offender’s system by monitoring their blood pressure and heart rate.
Mahmood said the new devices are the ‘holy grail’ of tagging technology because of the large proportion of criminals whose offending is driven by drugs.
Hellbound and Down 