The Greater London Authority is to run a pilot scheme fitting stalking offenders with GPS tags on release from prison.
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said the move, part of the wider GPS tagging programme, is aimed at protecting victims and preventing reoffending, and that more 200 offenders across varying sentencing types will be tagged by March 2026.
The pilot, which is being carried out in partnership with the Ministry of Justice’s GPS programme, will involve the use of technology from location monitoring specialist Buddi.
It provides real time GPS data to the London Probation Service, and along with accurate location and tracking data and heatmap technology is used to show an overview of a tagged person’s movements during the course of a day, week or month. It can also provide clues to their lifestyle habits, ensuring that the probation service can closely monitor tagged offenders across all 32 London boroughs.
The data detects non-compliance from tagged offenders – including increased risk by those who may have entered an exclusion zone set up to protect a victim once offenders have been released from prison. The mayor’s office said that previously this behaviour might have gone untraced, but now enforcement action can be taken promptly and where necessary to protect victims and bring perpetrators to account.
Timescales
Offenders on licence will have to wear the tags for up to six months, unless they are on licence for less than that period. The exact time will depend on the discretion of the probation officer in charge of their case.
Stalkers who receive community sentences will have to wear the tags for a maximum of 12 months, with the decision to be made by the judiciary.
The pilot as been developed in consultation with victims and survivor groups in the capital.
It follows a similar pilot on tagging perpetrators of domestic abuse, which ran from 2019-24, and an ongoing programme for knife crime offenders.
The data collected has also been used to assist in crime mapping, automatically cross-referencing the movements of tagged offenders with reported crimes in London. Initial results have indicated that the use of GPS tagging is a deterrent to further offending.
Forcing behaviour change
Khan said: “The £5.7 million GPS tagging programme has been working to ensure perpetrators of violence change their behaviour, not victims and survivors.
“The results we’ve seen so far show that GPS tagging is effectively dissuading individuals from reoffending, but also quickly detecting those offenders who breach their licence conditions and could pose a risk to their victims.”
An evaluation report on the tagging programme was published earlier this year.
