A thorough review should be made of the use of electronic monitoring in Scotland before the next contracts are drawn up in 2017. The current 2013 consultation provides some opportunity for this but there are unadressed questions about the best ways of using it, and the best organisational location of it.

The use of radio frequency EM as a stand-alone Restriction of Liberty order remains available to courts. This is despite limited evidence of its cost-effectiveness as a stand-alone measure, compared to the ways it is integrated with social work in many mainland European countries.

The use of electronic monitoring for breach of a Community Payback Order needs to be scrutinised to ensure both that is used in the first place and that is it used consistently across Scotland. The future use of GPS tracking, explored in the current consultation document, should be carefully thought out and any sign of drift towards the large scale use of it, as planned in England and Wales, avoided at all costs.