John McDonnell – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by John McDonnell on 2014-07-16.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, for what reasons the hardware and software providers in the new contract for electronic monitoring of offenders have been separated.

Andrew Selous

We divided the provision of electronic monitoring into discrete components, separating the supply of hardware and software, and competed these as separate lots because we consider this approach most likely to support the development and deployment of the best technology. This strategy also had the advantage of encouraging the participation of new entrants, SMEs and specialist companies, allowing them to bid for a particular component rather than the entire end-to-end service.