Blighty's prosecutors slammed for failing to deliver savings on electronic tagging The UK's Ministry of Justice has been slammed by the government's spending watchdog for failing to achieve value for money on its controversial electronic monitoring programme. The National Audit Office found the £60m GPS tagging system for offenders is five years behind plan. It was supposed to reduce costs by £9m, but has so …
The Ministry has learnt costly lessons from its failings
It will have had to opportunity to learn, but I doubt very much if it has.
Thames Water has been seriously criticised in the past (might still be for all I know) about the quantity of water that leaks away between reservoir and consumer. If gov.uk could be stopped from haemorrhaging our money between collection and "genuinely useful expenditure" then we probably wouldn't have a deficit.
Well this is the UK Justice Ministry you're talking about.
Split off from the Home Office in the hope that a more focused brief would get better results than the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink list of stuff the HO is responsible for (until it comes for them actually taking responsibility for the latest f**kup, when it turns out they are not).
This is the Ministry (and it's predecessors) that's been trying to move the UK Courts system (courts, cops, PO's, Solicitors, prisons etc) to move beyond the faxed letter as the SoA in reliable data transmission since the mid 80's (saw an old PCW about it).
Always reminds me of independence day...
You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
The prototype was probably the size of a briefcase.
On a more serious note I suspect that making GPS work reliably on an ankle bracelet could be quite challenging; just sitting in a car or bus could stop it working completely. It might work for "house arrest" but be hopelessly unreliable elsewhere.
"The essence of it consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector's situation, combined with the wellknown and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen...a spot from which, without any change of situation, a man may survey, in the same perfection, the whole number.... Confined in one of these cells, every motion of the limbs, and every muscle of the face exposed to view...indulged with perfect liberty within the space allotted to him, in what worse way could he vent his rage, than by beating his head against the walls?"
- Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon
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