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Qualifying curfews

punter99 — Fri, 09 May 2025 07:43:19 GMT

The other day I discovered that certain curfews count towards a persons sentence. Apparently this has been around since 2020, yet we hardly ever hear about it. There is nothing on Unlock, that I can see.

Has this become more common recently? It seems to be bail curfews that are involved, rather than HDC, which is for those released early from prison.

I wonder if this is being encouraged by the govt as a way of reducing the prison population. It would certainly help and given the long time that people have to wait to come to court, maybe they should allow people to apply for a bail curfew voluntarily?

https://www.brettwilson.co.uk/blog/non-qualifying-curfews-and-credit-against-sentences-of-imprisonment/

RE: Qualifying curfews

Evan Davis — Fri, 09 May 2025 07:43:19 GMT

As far as I'm aware, there has been provision since 2012 for time spent on "GPS tagged curfew-monitored bail" to be counted as 1/2 time served on any subsequent prison sentence imposed for the same offences. This was introduced by the LASPO 2012 Act: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2012/10/section/109/notes

My understanding of the way this works is that generally, up until relatively recently, only time where the defendant was monitored by a GPS tag and subject to a curfew confining them to their home address for more than 8 hours a day was counted as "qualifying".

However, a recent Court of Appeal decision set out that in fact, there is a wider power available to give limited credit for compliance with "non-qualifying curfews" (ie curfews that are over 8 hours/day but not necessarily monitored by GPS tags) and that this should not only be done in "exceptional circumstances" as was previously the case.

Although of course the Judiciary are "completely independent" from Government, I would think Gov't view may well have fed into the decision in some way. It's certainly convenient to be able to deduct curfew times from eventual prison sentences without having to publicly be seen to "cut sentences". I do worry about the potential pressure this could put on Probation services, though. I would expect that this may be one alongside a package of measures designed to negate some of the consequences on prison population numbers of sentence inflation we've seen in recent years - alongside SDS40 and ongoing talks about changes to Recall procedures.

RE: Qualifying curfews

AB2014 — Thu, 08 May 2025 11:34:32 GMT

[quote]

[b]punter99 - 8 May 25 10:53 AM[/b]

[/quote]

It might not be policy to encourage it at the moment, as they might feel the need to persuade the usual media suspects before they announce it, but this article seems to be relevant.