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Putting electronic tags on asylum seekers is ineffective and doesn’t stop people absconding from immigration bail, a government report has found.
Some migrants who crossed the Channel in small boats were tagged under a Home Office pilot, labelled “appalling” and “draconian” by refugee charities, from July 2022 to December 2023.
The controversial trial was subjected to a legal challenge, which eventually deemed the pilot unlawful.
Under the terms of the scheme, asylum seekers had to report to immigration enforcement fortnightly or stay in touch through a phone they carried at all times.
Now a government report assessing the scheme, published on Monday, has found that the pilot was ineffective and didn’t improve compliance with bail conditions.
The Home Office admitted that the pilot “underwent significant operational challenges interlinked to compliance behaviours, from setting up reporting and tags efficiently to legal challenges to the process”.
The report found that asylum seekers who were on GPS tags tended to go out of contact more quickly than those who were not wearing tags.
Researchers concluded: “After 16 months, there was no statistically significant difference between the proportions of individuals out of contact (66 per cent in both groups).”
The use of an electronic monitoring tag was not a barrier to absconding, the report found.
To test the effectiveness of the electronic tags, researchers compared a group of migrants on the tags with a group who had to undergo traditional in-person reporting at immigration centres.
Report authors warned that the findings could not be fully representative of the asylum seeker population in the UK because there was a high number of Albanian nationals in the monitored groups. They concluded that those migrants who had a low chance of their asylum claim succeeded were likely to abscond whether or not they were on the tag.
After December 2023, everyone who was on a GPS tag returned to in-person reporting due to the success of the legal challenge.
Woodren Brade, policy officer at the charity Refugee Council, said: “We hope these findings mark an end to electronic tagging in the asylum system once and for all. Using this invasive technology to track and control people’s every move makes no difference to reporting rates, and it is detrimental to refugees’ mental health, relationships, and ability to rebuild their lives with dignity.”
Shafiq Khaksar, an Afghan asylum seeker who was put on an electronic ankle tag, told The Independent that the constant monitoring made him feel like a criminal.
He described his experience in 2023, saying: “When I go to the mosque to pray, people look at me. I explain to people that this is an immigration tag but they do not believe me. When you pray you should raise your trousers above the ankle, but that exposes my tag. Also when you go down to prostration [kneel to pray] it shows as well. I am always sitting somewhere where they can’t see my tag from behind.
“My friends ask me why I can’t stay over with them, but I can’t go anywhere without informing probation first. I used to love swimming but now I can’t go.”
Before he became prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer said that the use of GPS tags to track asylum seekers was appropriate “whilst the claim is being processed”.
He told Sky News that there was “a case for tagging in particular cases”, but said that resourcing the National Crime Agency and speeding up asylum processing was more likely to be effective.
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