Alongside ROTL and the automatic early release schemes, electronic monitoring – generally known as tagging – is one of the main tools used to manage prisoners and offenders while they’re in the community. It comes up in a few different contexts: as part of Home Detention Curfew (HDC), as a standard condition of licence after release, and increasingly as a tool probation uses to manage specific risks such as domestic abuse or repeat offending.
Home Detention Curfew. HDC allows some prisoners serving a standard determinate sentence to be released early, under curfew, once they’ve served at least half their custodial term and a minimum of 28 days. Following changes brought in as part of the Sentencing Act 2026 reforms, prisoners serving four years or more are now eligible – previously they weren’t – and the maximum period someone can spend on HDC has been extended to 365 days, up from the old 135-day limit. A curfew requirement usually runs from around 7pm to 7am, though the court or the monitoring provider can adjust the hours to fit things like work or childcare. You’ll wear an ankle tag, and a monitoring unit is fitted at your approved address; the provider checks compliance electronically and can also make unannounced visits.
Not everyone is eligible. Anyone convicted of an offence requiring registration as a sex offender, serving an extended sentence, subject to the “two-thirds release” provisions for the most serious offenders, or with a terrorism-related conviction is excluded by law. A number of other offences – including homicide, offences involving firearms or explosives, child cruelty, and hate crime – carry a presumption against HDC unless there are exceptional circumstances, as does a MAPPA Level 2 or 3 risk categorisation.
Breach. If the tag shows you’ve breached your curfew, or you tamper with the equipment, the monitoring provider reports it to the Ministry of Justice’s Public Protection Casework Section, who decide whether to issue a warning, recall you to custody, or take no action. A recall for breaching HDC generally rules you out of HDC again for the rest of that sentence.
Tagging after release. Tagging isn’t just for HDC – it’s increasingly used as a standard licence condition too. GPS location tags are used to monitor prison leavers assessed as posing a risk of domestic abuse (the DAPOL programme) and, in a growing number of police force areas, to track people released after acquisitive crime offences such as burglary and theft, cross-referencing their movements against unsolved local crimes. A separate proximity monitoring scheme creates an alert if a tagged offender gets close to a named victim, aimed at stalking and domestic abuse cases. Alcohol monitoring tags (formally the Alcohol Abstinence Monitoring Requirement, or AAMR) test sweat continuously for alcohol and can be attached as a licence or court condition where alcohol played a part in the offending; government figures put compliance at above 97%.
Electronic monitoring in England and Wales is currently run under contract by Serco and G4S on behalf of the Ministry of Justice, and the government has committed to a significant expansion of tagging – covering tens of thousands more offenders over the next few years – as part of a wider £100 million investment programme. As with ROTL and early release, tagging attracts regular political and media attention, particularly when equipment fails or a tagged offender goes on to commit a further serious offence; see ROTL & Early Release Policy Changes for how that’s played out.
The current rules for HDC are set out in HMPPS’s Home Detention Curfew Policy Framework.