In first half of this year 1,600 tags also had no signal for over two weeks, highlighting scale of probation crisis

More than 5,000 offenders went unmonitored in the first half of the year because probation staff failed to install electronic tags, while 1,600 tags had no signal for more than two weeks due to faults, a report has found.

The Institute for Government (IfG) has revealed the full scale of the crisis in the probation system in England and Wales, concluding that “rationing probation supervision” due to a lack of staff meant sentences imposed by the court had become “essentially a fiction” for most offenders.