G4S Whistleblower Nigel Mills Reveals How Criminals Are Roaming Free Because of Security Firm...

7/30/2019 G4S Whistleblower Nigel Mills Reveals How Criminals Are Roaming Free Because of Security Firm Blunders _ Mail

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The REAL tagging scandal: G4S whistleblowerpaid 9 an hour to monitor convicts reveals

how criminals are roaming free because of

security firm blunders

Nigel Mills accused the Justice Secretary of failing to grasp scale of crisis

He says that faulty equipment means that the firm cannot track offenders

Innocent offenders were 'returned to jail for breaches that did not happen'Employees took shor tcuts to avoid calling conv icts who had breached curfew

By Elizabeth Sanderson

PUBLISHED: 22:44 GMT, 13 J uly 2013 | UPDATED: 10:56 GMT, 14 J uly 2013

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Outspoken: G4S whistleblower Nigel Mills outside the office in Manchester where he used

to work for the security company

Thousands of tagged criminals are roaming free or being wrongly returned to prison because a securityfirm funded by the taxpayer is failing to monitor them, a whistleblower says today.

Nigel Mills, 45, claims that G4S is putting the safety of the public and offenders at risk by relying on

faulty equipment that cannot keep track of convicts.

He also accuses the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, of failing to grasp the scale of the crisis at thecompany, which faces an investigation by the Serious Fraud Office over claims it charged for tags that didnot exist.

The Cabinet Office is to review all other G4S contracts after claims it was billing the taxpayer for trackingthe movements of offenders who have moved abroad, returned to prison or even died.

G4S came under fire last year after failing to deliver enough security officers for the Olympics and lastweek faced fresh claims it and private firm Serco overcharged the taxpayer by up to 50million.

Today we can disclose that the crisis followed a complaint from Mr Mills, a former part-time employee atthe firm for seven years.

But Mr Mills, an A-level maths teacher from Manchester, claims that a far more serious problem has beenoverlooked that the security firms tagging system does not work.

In a disturbing account of the working practices at G4Ss control centre in Manchester, Mr Mills alleges:

The state of the companys equipment makes it impossible to monitor a tagged persons movementsproperly.Equipment failures allow tagged offenders to escape the authorities unnoticed but also incorrectlyidentify when breaches have taken place.Innocent ex-prisoners have been returned to jail for breaches of their curfew that did not take place.

Employees used computer shortcuts to avoid calling offenders who had apparently breachedcurfews.Multiple requests were made for tagging orders for a single criminal which could cost taxpayersmillions.


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Mr Mills wrote to the National Audit Office last March, detailing how he thinks the company was beingmismanaged.

Criticism: Mr Mills, 45, claims that G4S is putting the safety of the public and offendersat risk by relying on faulty equipment t hat cannot keep tr ack of convicts

Numerous interviews took place and, on May 3, he received a letter thanking him for his information andrevealing a joint investigation into his allegations had been launched with the Ministry of J ustice.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Mr Mills said: When I joined, I thought the system was designed to

keep people safe those on tags and the public but it doesnt take very long to realise that G4Ss firstpriority is to maximise its income.

Chris Grayling wants to maintain confidence in tagging because theres so many people in prison and hedoesnt want to put any more pressure on the system.

'He wants to focus on the accounting, but he needs to look at root and branch reform.

Mr Mills fears that tagging equipment failures could lead to some dangerous criminals being allowed toroam free.


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Faulty: The state of the company's equipment is said to be making it impossible to

monitor a person's movement correctly, claims Mr Mills

He said: I dont know what proportion of those tagged are genuinely a threat. Some are just a nuisance andsome are quite sad cases.

But there are others who are on early release from prison. We dont know what their original offence was.

Its worrying as you dont know what type of person that is. When a persons not monitored, its usuallybecause of faulty kit and its pot luck who that happens to.

Mr Mills joined the company in February 2005 as a care control officer. He was head of science,technology, engineering and mathematics at a further education college in Manchester a post he stillholds.

He had just separated from his wife, and took on the extra work to help bring up their four children. His jobwas to monitor people on tags, report any breaches of their curfew and keep their files accurate and up todate.


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Under fire: Mr Mills also accuses the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, pictured, of failing

to grasp the scale of the crisis at the company,

However, he claims he experienced routine problems with the system. Mr Mills says: Because theyrecycled the tagging kit, it would break down.

The batteries would run out and on our system that would suggest they had broken the curfew.

People would be home but showing on our system as absent.

In the first year, I got a call from a probation officer to say a police officer had turned up at the home whereshe worked.

She said: Youve sent this police officer round to return this guy to jail and I swear to you, on my life, hehas not been out.

'Hes 64, released from prison and has been sitting in the loft, reading books. I realised what hadhappened.

He claims the police officer was told the ex-prisoner had breached the terms of his release even thoughG4S knew the battery had simply broken down.

Mr Mills said: [The man] was on our system [but] it said he had been missing for three days. I spoke to myshift manager and said, It looks like this tags died. She said, Oh yeah, the batterys dead. She was blasabout it; it happened so much.

It comes down to public protection. By the same token, if that guy had been genuinely missing for threedays, we wouldnt have known. He could have been anywhere.

Mr Mills, who was paid 8.97 an hour, alleges the company failed to check equipment because it would costthem money.

He claims: You could tell when a battery was running down because people would go in and out of range allthe time.

Yet when I reported it, they didnt want to know. The company is only paid a fee for the installation of thetag and the decommissioning.


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'When I joined, I thought the system was designed to keep people safe

those on tags and the public but it doesnt take very long to realise that

G4Ss first priori ty is to maximise its income.'

- Nigel Mills

'They also get a daily fee for monitoring us but they dont get anything for visits in the field.

There was pressure on us not to request visits. When you did make a request, day after day, theyd ignoreit. All G4S care about is putting the tags on and taking them off.

'The fact they end up not monitored doesnt matter to them at all. They were desperate and always havebeen desperate not to draw any undue concern about the reliability of the evidence the kit produces.

Electronic tagging is a lucrative business. In the 15 years since it was introduced, the number of people ona tag at any one time now exceeds 35,000.

G4S is responsible for 15,000 of these, but the Coalition has announced it expects the number of personstagged in the community to rise to 180,000 by 2015.

According to official figures, G4S was paid 62.3million in the year 2011/12 for tagging and that wasexcluding payments by the UK Border Agency.

If the Coalition goes ahead with its plans to expand the tagging system, the overall value of the contractswill exceed 1billion.

Unlike rival company, Serco, which is also facing a fraud investigation, G4S has declined to hand over itsrecords or withdraw from the next generation of tagging contracts.

Needing help: G4S was widely criticised last summer for its failure to fulfill its cont ract t o

provide security at the London Olympics. The Government had to draft soldiers in t o helpout

G4S is the worlds largest private security firm and also holds Government contracts running prisons,immigration and border controls and welfare-to-work programmes.


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Mr Mills said: Im a public service worker, a teacher, so this was a real eye-opener for me. As far as I cansee, they only care about money.

'Manchester was the control centre for every single person on a tag provided by G4S. That was 14,000people when I left. In my section, which was a mixture of full and part-time staff, there were only 30 peoplebut sometimes there were only nine.

Mr Mills claims that the understaffing meant they were forced to resort to other measures to improveperformance and keep to the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of their contract.

I described what was going on at the cont rol centre the way they only

did the bare min imum and asked them to look at the kit which I believe

means we cant do our job. How can we monitor people if we cant trust

whats on our screens?

- Nigel Mills

He claimed: When someone goes out of range, or breaches their curfew, it is called an event. One of the

KPIs was that we had to begin processing each event within 20 minutes.

'This meant calling the person, checking where they were and noting down the reasons for the violation forthat persons record.

When I started working there, there was one manager and he sat there all night at his computer, poking afew keys as if he was playing space invaders.

'What I later learnt was that there were shortcut keys if you hit F4 and F7, it would automatically go on tothat persons record that you had called them but they didnt answer.

Ive been to court many times as an expert witness on the part of G4S knowing or at least suspecting the log is a whole load of F4s and F7s.

'I suspect less than 25 per cent of the calls on the logs were genuine. Do the maths. You have 15 to 20people on a shift and thousands of people to investigate.

'Each conversation takes about five minutes, sometimes more. You couldnt possibly have spoken to allthose people.


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Innocent: Convicts are being taken back to jail for breaching their curfew when breaches

haven't actually taken place

Mr Mills, who warned the company last J uly that he did not believe its systems were working, was eventuallydismissed last October.

He is taking G4S to an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, due to be heard next month. Last March he

also contacted the National Audit Office, believing there were more serious issues at stake than his owngripes against the company.

He said: I wrote to them with a report of the things I thought were wrong. I told them to compare theoutgoing calls to the incoming as this should show that thanks to the F4 and F7 shortcuts they wouldntmatch up.

I described what was going on at the control centre the way they only did the bare minimum and askedthem to look at the kit which I believe means we cant do our job. How can we monitor people if we canttrust whats on our screens?

The Audit Office requested a conference call and, according to Mr Mills, it was a chance remark that really

sparked their interest.

He claims: I was giving them examples of corrupt practice and I mentioned how, during the summerholidays, I did more day shifts.

In the summer of 2011, I was trained to put records on to the system. The court would send a fax or a PDFof the court order with the details of the case, reference numbers, and the type of tagging. Its effectivelylike a bill of sale.

One day a guy had three offences taken into consideration at the same hearing. I put them on the systemas a single item because you can only get one tag.

'They employ someone to check what youre feeding in. I was told Id done it wrongly, that I should put it in

three times. So there were three live records for three tags but we were only monitoring one.

It happened a lot. One court might sentence a person to one thing and another to something else. Its thesame person but they go down as two records. This can happen four or five times.


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Mr Mills hadnt believed this to be the key issue. He said: I thought there was fraud on a number of fronts on the KPIs, the misprocessing of F4s and F7s, the potential miscarriages of justice but this was the thingthey were clearly interested in and it sent them investigating down another avenue.

Outraged: Shadow Justice Minister Sadiq Khan has called for a full police inquiry into the

allegations

They went away for a week and said, were going ahead with a Price Waterhouse, Coopers audit.

The director wrote to Mr Mills and confirmed they are investigating his allegations that the equipment usedby G4S is faulty, saying: I raised your concerns with Ministry of J ustice officials at a senior level... We have

jointly agreed a way forward and we currently have a team in place investigating.

Mr Mills had no idea of the effect his revelations would have.

He says: I know G4S would say Im just a disgruntled employee but the Audit Office are taking meseriously. It raises an important issue at the heart of our system with private companies running publicservices.

A spokesman for the National Audit Office said: I can confirm that we are going to be doing some work on

the Governments management of suppliers.

A spokesman for G4S said: Mr Mills has made a number of baseless allegations since he was dismissedfor gross misconduct due to the falsification of records, serious negligence and breach of procedures lastyear.

These allegations have been investigated as part of the audit being carried out on behalf of the Ministry ofJ ustice, with which we are co-operating fully.

The Ministry of J ustice insisted last night the issues identified by the audit team relate to billing and not topublic safety.

Labours shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan said: These outrageous revelations demand a full police

inquiry.

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