The Metropolitan Police will stop routinely investigating some minor electronic tagging breaches, allowing offenders who violate court-imposed conditions for less than an hour to avoid immediate police action as officers redirect resources towards more serious crime.
The policy shift reflects mounting pressure on policing and the criminal justice system as thousands of prisoners are released early into the community, increasing the demands on officers tasked with monitoring offenders and enforcing their licence conditions.
Under the new approach, breaches lasting less than an hour will not routinely be investigated unless they involve high-risk offenders, including domestic abusers, or there is evidence of a crime. The force said officers had been overwhelmed by low-level infringements, including cases in which offenders briefly left their homes during curfews to smoke a cigarette.
Electronic tags can enforce curfews, track movements around the clock and alert authorities when offenders enter prohibited areas or approach locations from which they have been barred to protect victims. Prisoners released on licence must also comply with conditions such as attending appointments with probation officers, with breaches potentially resulting in a return to custody.
The Met said the decision was intended to ensure that police resources were concentrated where they could make the greatest difference to public safety.
“To best protect the public, those pressures cannot always fall on policing, and certainly not without prioritisation. Offenders who are high risk, such as domestic abusers, are a priority,” a force spokesperson said.
The scale of the challenge was illustrated by a case in which police were reportedly notified 19 hours after a GPS tag recorded an offender returning home 15 minutes late. The force argued that deploying several officers for hours to deal with minor infringements was not necessarily the most effective use of resources.
The change comes as the Government’s early-release programme continues to put pressure on the prison and probation systems. Some 4,500 prisoners are due to be released early by next June, with 1,350 already freed this month, according to the figures supplied.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Met Commissioner, said earlier this month that officers were dealing with more than 100 tagging breaches a week, alongside two or three cases involving prisoners released early who had to be arrested and returned to jail.
“Where there is a risk to the public, particularly if someone is breaching conditions designed to protect a victim, we will absolutely respond,” he said.
The force stressed that all breaches would still be reviewed for safeguarding risks. Domestic abuse campaigners have acknowledged the need to prioritise scarce police resources, while warning that monitoring arrangements must be designed around the risks faced by victims.
Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, chairman of the charity Refuge, said offenders who breached exclusion zones or restrictions intended to protect victims must remain a priority.
“When are we going to grip the fact that these offenders need a specific set of measures for safely managing them in the community, and design them from scratch rather than trying to take generic offender conditions and tweak them?” she said.
The policy debate is unfolding as prisoner recalls rise. A report by the Institute for Government found that there were 74 recalls for every 100 former prisoners supervised in the community in 2025, compared with 35 in 2021. Only 16 of the 74 recalls were prompted by an offender being charged with another crime, suggesting that breaches of licence conditions accounted for much of the increase.
The Ministry of Justice said the Government had inherited a prison system “on the brink of collapse” and insisted that public safety would not be compromised.
“We will never jeopardise public safety,” a spokesperson said, pointing to expanded electronic tagging, restriction zones and provisions allowing victims to have a say in licence conditions.
The central dilemma remains unresolved as how to manage growing numbers of offenders in the community without diverting police officers from serious crime or weakening safeguards designed to protect the public. For the Met, the answer is to distinguish between minor technical breaches and incidents that indicate a genuine threat. For victims and campaigners, the test will be whether that distinction works when the consequences of a missed warning could be severe.
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