After a re-procurement exercise, the contractor Serco will replace Capita Business Services as the provider of electronic monitoring ‘tagging’ services in England and Wales. For a previous contract for the same service, Serco was required to repay the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) £70.5 and was fined £19.2m as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Serco was also required to do ‘self-cleaning’ to make it eligible to bid again for public sector contracts. A House of Lords committee has asked in a report what “self-cleaning” involves.
Another contractor, G4S, overcharged the Ministry of Justice for monitoring, including multiple times for the same cases and for cases where the
monitored person had died.
Lord Rowlands, Member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, said: “The Ministry of Justice has granted new public contracts to these companies worth over £500m but chose not to inform the House of its previous history with these companies. We find that omission inexcusable. The Public Accounts Committee has expressed serious concerns about the department’s [MoJ] capability to handle such contracts and MoJ’s explanations should be transparent so they are properly accountable to both the public and Parliament.
“Our committee’s role is to make sure that the Government’s explanation of its policy is clear, so that debates are properly informed about the full background, and to draw any flaws in the explanation to attention of the House: we didn’t expect to have yet another egregious example.
“While we received some additional information from the department, the responses provided are still obscure, referring to the firms “self-cleaning” and to MoJ’s “enhanced monitoring” without explaining what that actually means. We wonder why the MoJ seems so reliant on these companies, which have been fined for misconduct.
“We find it remarkable that a contract can be awarded to a company that has been investigated by the Serious Fraud Office and subject to fines for misconduct and a deferred prosecution agreement, especially given the value of these new contracts awarded. We have recommended that the House seeks more detailed answers from the Government on these matters and on how the decision to defer prosecution was made.”
The committee in a report noted that regulations allow suppliers to be excluded from bidding for new contracts, such as for fraud, criminal offences
and previous poor performance. The MoJ said there were were no grounds to prevent Serco or G4S from bidding as they had complied with the terms of the deferred prosecution, had not been convicted of an offence, and had “self-cleaned”. Three years of ‘enhanced monitoring’ of G4S’s ‘corporate renewal actions’ concluded on April 8.
As for a HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) programme of work on electronic monitoring services, the peers’ report noted ‘significant delays and setbacks’ and a ‘high-risk and over-complicated delivery model, an overambitious timetable for delivery and a failure to introduce a new case
management system’. For the committee’s report visit parliament.uk.
