My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Beecham and Lord Thomas of Gresford, for their contributions. They raised a number of issues that I think are pertinent to the order that we are discussing. As I hope I mentioned in my opening remarks, feedback has already been received from the pilots that have already finished, and indeed the one that is ongoing, that the system does work and is useful for the task that has been set for it. The main feature now is for the Government to learn what they can about how the pilot operated and how to put that into the operations of the new system when it comes online next year.
A summary of the conclusions of the pilot will of course be made available. It is important that we look at this because, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, pointed out, this is not surveillance and it is not real time, which would be far too resource-intensive. It is information that can be gathered and which allows probation officers and others to have a more informed conversation with the offender. The offender knows that they are being monitored. We believe that it will aid rehabilitation and it is my wish and my hope that it keeps some offenders out of prison, because in some cases that is certainly not helpful.
The noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, also mentioned the issue of timing. I am well aware that the results of the pilot are not available to us now, but we do know that the system works. We also know, as we spent most of yesterday discussing, that we are about to receive a tsunami of secondary legislation. It is therefore the department’s opinion that, if we lay this order before Parliament now, we can be confident that it will go through and become operational and that this is appropriate before Parliament’s mind turns to matters of a European Union nature and we are deluged with SIs from other areas. It also means that if we have an early decision in your Lordships’ House, that will give us plenty of time to liaise with the stakeholders—there are many in this system—and make sure that our plan for delivery is absolutely watertight.
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The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, asked about the suppliers. I think I mentioned in my opening remarks that commercial discussions will be going on over the summer but we obviously know who the suppliers will be, subject of course to the conclusion of those commercial discussions. The first lot is for the electronic monitoring system itself, which will be going to Capita. Then we have Airbus, which will be mapping the data from the tags and then supplying it to the monitoring system. G4S will be providing the hardware, which I saw a prototype of this week; it looks entirely robust and fit for purpose. The last of the four lots is Telefónica, which of course is a mobile phone operator and will be providing resilient mobile telecoms for the network to enable transmission of data. That is where things are in terms of the suppliers.
I did not go into a great amount of detail about the pilots and I am happy to share a few details now with the noble Lord, Lord Beecham. The MoJ pilot was commenced in October 2016 and concluded in March 2018, so it ran for 18 months. It was carried out in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire,
Hertfordshire, Leicestershire, Staffordshire and the West Midlands—so, over a broad geographic spread, which gives us some comfort about the robustness of the system. It concluded that there were subjects from a variety of backgrounds, including those on prison licence, community sentences and court bail. At this time, in total for the MoJ pilot and the MOPAC pilot, there have been 661 cases. More will obviously be added to that number as the MOPAC pilot reaches its conclusion, which it will not do until next year. I feel that the pilot has been and continues to be robust. I must also mention that the MOPAC pilot is in north London and east London, as it is run by the Mayor of London’s office.
Having answered as many questions from noble Lords as I possibly can, I hope that the Committee will agree to commence this legislative provision. It is proportionate and a sensible step to take.