The IfG report reveals the full scale of the crisis in the probation system in England and Wales, concluding that "rationing probation supervision" due to a lack of staff meant sentences imposed by the court had become "essentially a fiction" for most offenders.
Between January and April, more than 5,000 people who should have been monitored were not tagged, equating to 15% of all people with an electronic tagging order. Almost 1,600 people were wearing a tag that did not send a signal to the monitoring system for two weeks due to technical faults or the device not being charged.
The report found that electronic tagging was "performing poorly and failing to meet demand". It also noted that not a single probation delivery unit inspected in 2024 or 2025 received a rating above "requires improvement", and two-thirds were rated "inadequate".
Once the 2026 Sentencing Act, which reduces the release point for many sentences, is fully implemented, most offenders will spend the final third of their sentence on licence without any active supervision, the report said. "This risks further undermining public trust in the criminal justice system and making sentences even more convoluted and opaque, including to victims," it found.
Cassia Rowland, associate director at the institute and author of the report, said probation staff were deeply demoralised. "They feel everything is really chaotic, all of these changes are being flung on to them, they're worried about their personal safety and the public protection risk of the people they're managing," she said.
She added: "If you get given a six-year sentence, you're most likely going to be spending two years in prison, two years on probation and then two years with conditions that no one is monitoring or enforcing. That's just not a six-year sentence."
The report follows earlier scrutiny of the tagging system, with the UK justice secretary previously unable to say how many early release prisoners had been tagged.