Location monitoring tags will be introduced in Youth Courts across England and Wales from 30 March 2020. This significant change follows a successful pilot scheme amongst under 18s in London at the end of November 2019. Youth Offending Teams have provided positive feedback on outcomes and indicated that using the tags has helped with the management of children in the community.
The GPS-enabled tags use satellite technology to monitor the wearer’s location and will be available alongside standard curfew tags, which remain an t option for the management and supervision of offenders and defendants in the community.
Location Monitoring is expected to be used for the following;
- To monitor the compliance of an exclusion zone as identified on a map, or to monitor a child’s attendance at a particular activity (e.g. education programme)
- Alongside the monitoring of a curfew requirement/condition
- To monitor a child’s whereabouts, known as trail monitoring*. Location data can be requested retrospectively from EMS for these cases.
The new capability is the most significant change in electronic monitoring since the launch of the national service in 1999, and builds on the roll-out of location monitoring tags to adults, that completed in September 2019.
