Reblogged from Kate Belgrave:
"Does the government fancy a future where it can tag people who claim benefits – and sanction anyone who steps away from Jobmatch for ten minutes?"
I rarely use the words “fascinating” and “press release” in the same
sentence, but:
This fascinating press release appeared on the Capita website recently:
“Capita
[is the] preferred bidder for electronic monitoring contract.”
So.
It seems that Capita has positioned itself (with
three other companies) to take over the dire electronic tagging system run
by Serco and G4S for the Ministry of Justice. By “dire,” I mean “very likely
fraudulent”: Serco and G4S were recently slammed
by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for charging the taxpayer tens of millions of
pounds for people they claimed to have tagged, but who turned out to be dead or
incarcerated. Serco will participate in an independent “forensic audit” as a
result. G4S won’t: according
to the MOJ, they told Grayling No and were referred to the SFO. G4S, amazingly, told Robert
Peston that it opted to call in the SFO itself. I am not sure what the real
situation is there. All I know is that we get to keep paying for it.
And paying for it. We now have Capita as preferred bidder for a large
electronic monitoring contract. Unfortunately, it is a contract that sets many
alarms off itself. Chief among these Capita’s plan to make £400m in its first
six years of the contract and its reluctance to explain in detail (to me anyway)
exactly how it proposes to do that. I hope that they have decided against
targeting the dead. Of even greater concern, though, is the extent to which they
apparently plan to target and tag the living. Their
press release says that the £400m in those first six years will be generated
on the basis of an “anticipated increase in the use of tags beyond the current
numbers of monitored individuals.” Early days, I know, but £400m is a lot of
money, so we’re surely talking a lot of monitored individuals.
I’m going back and forwards with the MOJ at the moment for more on who
exactly the ministry proposes to tag and how long for when we’re talking
offenders and/or ex-offenders: the
press release they sent speaks, vaguely, of “tracking the movement of
offenders in the community,” “delivering swifter justice,” “tracking offenders
wherever they go 24 hours a day,” (in another call, the MOJ says that’s an
advantage of the new technology it expects to be provided) and stopping
“paedophiles hanging around” at school gates. Napo offers more details in its
take: Napo said
last year that as government dramatically increased the number of people it
tagged, “it was envisaged that tagging would be a condition of all community
orders. Currently around 35,000 offenders are tagged for up to 12 hours and for
a maximum of six months, either as a condition of a community order, or early
release from prison on Home Detention Curfew. This has risen hugely over a
15-year period from a few hundred individuals tagged per year to the current
level of tens of thousands. Under the government scheme, the number tagged could
rise 180,000 or even more, an increase therefore of six-fold.”
So there’s that.
I also wonder if several hundred million quid’s worth of tagging will go
beyond the offenders and ex-offenders that Chris
Grayling seems so obsessed with tagging and tracking long after they are
released from jail (I don’t personally believe the tagging of people in
those categories should be accepted as written, either – but more on that later.
The MOJ says that the length of time on a tag will be decided by judges).
I think that it will. Capita certainly sees a market beyond so-called justice
and the MOJ. Like Serco and G4S, Capita thinks big. Certainly, Capita thinks a
lot bigger than Grayling. You could go as far to say that Capita sees the MOJ
contract as a launching-pad for the real projectile – an enormous net to sling
across the public sector and people who use it, and then, it would seem, the
entire world. You wouldn’t have to be a wild conspiracy type to reach that
conclusion, either. Just
go back to that Capita press release. It’s fascinating, as I say. “Further
significant growth is expected through the expansion of services
to other government departments and agencies.” (my emphasis).
“Capita will work with the MOJ to promote the intellectual property which
underpins the service internationally, generating further growth.” “The
service has been designed to enable other government bodies – for example, the
probation services, the NHS and social care agencies, to procure related
services.” (my emphasis).
I wonder about all of this, you know. Who are the people that the government
and/or Capita (I’m not entirely sure which is which or who is who any more)
really plan to tag as this golden future unfolds? Are
they thousands of ex-offenders who have served their time, but who Grayling
decides need a further kicking, for political gain at least? Are they the
people who were
once served by the probation service that Grayling is in the process of
privatising and destroying? Where is this all meant to end?
And what does Capita mean when it talks about “enabling” social care agencies
and the NHS and other government bodies with this sort of technology? Are they
thinking, say, of replacing paid care staff with a tag? Will this tagged
population include
people who are in and out of hospital with serious mental health conditions, but
whose services have been cut and who have nowhere to go and nobody to help if
there are times when they become disoriented? And what about people
who the government is already after? Will we see pre-emptive tagging of
people who are known (and entitled, by the way) to attend anti-government
protests, or
who plan to disrupt, say, a royal wedding? What about people on the work
programme, even? Does the government fancy a future where it can tag people who
claim benefits – and sanction anyone who steps away from Jobmatch for ten
minutes? I wonder about these things.
So I asked Capita for details. That went about as well as I expected it to.
Capita said talk to the MOJ. The MOJ, needless to say, said talk to Capita.
Then, the MOJ rang me thinking I was Capita. Trying to recover from this error,
the MOJ told me to ring the Department of Health about people who might be
tagged through the health system. I told the MOJ to ring Capita and tell Capita
to tell me which groups of people it was basing its projections on. Am now
waiting for Capita to ring and tell me to go back to the MOJ, the Department of
Health, the DWP and every council out there that still has social services, to
ask what Capita has in mind for their client groups. This will probably go on
until I’m dead.
In the meantime, it’s worth having a think. I think, for example, of
the woman I spoke to for this article who had a long-term schizophrenia
diagnoses and alcoholism, and who’d been in and out of hospital, and who’d
been able to live an independent life in a supported living hostel. The hostel
was staffed around the clock. People who lived there came and went freely, but
were able to contact staff if they got disoriented, or lost, or if abusers were
following them, or trying to get into the building. That hostel was closed down
though, as was another in the same borough. The woman I spoke to was terrified
of being placed in low-support accommodation, or a B&B because she’d been
abused in such places before. And she’d wandered before and often got lost and
confused when she was drinking. She liked the hostel and had good relationships
with staff. She certainly liked the arrangement better than the alternative –
which was being cast adrift completely. Is she the sort of person who would be
tagged in future – someone no longer thought worthy of decent services or decent
accommodation, but to be kept track of in a basic way?
And what about other people who are losing services? I think about a story I
did in Ealing earlier this year. I
spent a lot of time talking to Ealing people with learning difficulties and
their families about council plans to cut their training-to-work centre and
the support staff who worked there. The people who used the centre would get
nothing as a replacement: Ealing
council no longer allocates funding to people with “moderate” needs. The
thing was – safety was an issue. One mother of a 28-year-old man who
attended that centre kept telling me that she appreciated the centre because she
knew her son was safe there. Out on the streets on his own, he got picked on,
robbed and, often, just lost. The thing was – he would be on his own if
the centre was closed, because he’d be given little or nothing to replace it, or
to pay for personal assistants or support. His mother could pay for a mentor to
accompany him sometimes, but could only afford one day a week. So in future –
will she and families of people with even more substantial needs whose care will
undoubtedly be cut, be told their best and only option is a tag? Is the future
of social care a world where, instead of proper funding for independent living,
money is given to the likes of Capita to tag people and update their families
with their basic positioning?
That issue that has long been debated, of course. There’s been much
discussion, for example, about the ethics of tagging of people with dementia,
who do sometimes become disoriented or lost: “of the 700,000 people in Britain
with some form of dementia, up to 60% occasionally felt compelled to walk away
from home without knowing how or where to return,” the
Alzheimer’s Society told the Guardian some time ago in a debate on the
topic. Some people welcomed the technology, saying it gave them greater
freedom in the earlier stages of their conditions. But, as
you can see from that story, there was and is concern that the technology
infringed on human rights and that it would be used in place of high-quality
care and personal assistants – a concern that must be even
more pressing now as social care budgets disappear.
In my experience, too, people want human contact as well as technology. I’ll
be written off as a wet hippie for saying that, but it really is true. People
make that sort of point all the time when you talk with them. Another story:
several years ago, Barnet council announced that it would remove onsite wardens
from sheltered housing flats in the borough. One of the justifications for this
plan (which was very unpopular with sheltered housing residents) was that the
elderly people in those flats had alarms and electronic means of summonsing help
if they needed it. But the elderly people who turned out at Hendon Town Hall to
protest the cut did not have faith in those alarms. They said no button or alarm
would compensate for having a real person onsite to check in with, or to alert
when someone was feeling unwell.
No technology is entirely dependable. Tagging technology certainly isn’t.
Napo, which is
battling the privatisation of probation services as we speak, has long
argued that tagging systems are unreliable and alone don’t impact on crime. Concerns listed in
Napo’s 2012 paper on tagging include: faulty equipment, tags not working
when people take baths or showers, people being recalled to custody
unnecessarily, high-risk offenders not being monitored properly and instances
where devices were never fitted. So – tagging companies are not always be
brilliant at tracking and finding people who have been tagged. They are,
however, brilliant at tracking and finding councillors and MPs who are willing
to pay and pay for their technology. Even the Policy Exchange has raised
concerns about this. As the Howard League’s Andrew Neilson reported
here last year, the Policy Exchange said “that the use of electronic
monitoring has been too expensive and dominated by the duopoly of Serco and G4S,
leading to a lack of innovation and a use of technology that has changed little
since it was first deployed in 1989.” Cost upset the Exchange: “the report
estimates that electronic monitoring an individual costs £13.14 per day in
England and Wales, while the equivalent in the United States was £1.22.”
So. Intriguing, as I say. Intriguing to imagine where all of this is going
and who will end up tagging whom. Capita obviously thinks the sky is the limit.
CE
Paul Pindar freely admits in his press release that “when fully live, this
is expected to be the largest, single and most advanced ‘tagging’ system in the
world.”
He also says that the thing will be run “to the highest possible standards of
governance and transparency.” That’s an intriguing claim as well. I’m guessing
that Paul doesn’t realising that he’s the CE of the company that recently put
the translation service in meltdown, or brought
us the black hole that is Service Birmingham (where transparency is such a
problem that a sub-committee was recently set up for councillors who publicly
admitted they did not know how much money the council was paying Capita via
Service Birmingham), and the Sefton council debacle (Sefton
is cutting short a £65m contract with Capita, because it has failed to deliver
savings). There are times when I think that the only people round here who
really need tagging are the ones from these companies who keep visiting council
and government buildings and leaving with blank cheques.
Update September 17:
In other news, the Lib Dems announced today a policy to provide free school
lunches. Only
last week, Capita announced that it was now in school lunches. I simply observe
that I will watch with interest to see who provides lunches.
Also,
Capita had said that it would be all right for me to attend this workfare
conference, but yesterday wrote to say that there would be no press pass
allowance at the event after all.
