The Government watched me get drunk to prove they can keep an eye on criminals

But when I met with the Sentencing Minister, Jake Richards, in a pub, it wasn’t for a social meeting.

An hour earlier, I’d been fitted with an ankle tag; a crucial piece of tech which ministers are relying on heavily to push through reforms to the criminal justice system, and help overcrowded prisons breathe.

I was being treated like a convict.

The Ministry of Justice wanted to show me how quickly they’d know if I had broken a condition of my getting out of jail, or even avoiding a custodial sentence altogether, if alcohol had played a role in my offending.

The tag is a light but chunky piece of kit that’s attached to your leg and measures your ‘sweat’ for any traces of alcohol.

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The number of offenders using them in England and Wales has increased by 17 per cent in three months - with 4,287 alcohol monitoring orders in place in December 2025.

New sentencing laws are about to see that figure increase further, with a presumption against jail terms of under 12 months and a bigger focus on community punishments.

Jake Richards, as he sipped a pint of lager with me, hailed the success they’ve seen so far with alcohol monitoring.

“97 per cent of people on these tags don’t go back to booze,” he said, “so we’re greatly expanding and investing in their use to try and cut crime.

“The vast majority of people can go to the pub and enjoy a few drinks and get on with their lives but for others it's a real catalyst for criminal behaviour.

“Alcohol-related crime costs the economy over £20 billion a year, and there are high streets and areas where people don’t go after dark because they know people are getting drunk, so this could be quite transformative for those areas.”

After three hours of drinking, I was told to wear the tag home and return in the morning to see my results.

And as expected, yet still to my surprise, the team monitoring my readings like probation officers would if I was really on license, showed me they could see precisely when I was in the pub.

The first reading had pinged back to them exactly an hour after I took my first sip.

And they could see I continued to drink until my blood alcohol level reached around 2.5 times the drink-drive limit.

On top of that, and what I hadn’t fully realised would happen, they also saw when I tried to remove the tag when I was struggling to sleep with it on.

“Probation officers would likely have come round to question you on that,” the officials told me.

Or at least, that would be the case in theory.

A report by MPs this week found that the Probation Service is so thinly stretched, it’s ‘on the brink of collapse’.

The Public Accounts Committee has raised concerns at how prepared the service is for a sharp increase in the number of electronic tags for offenders, as sentencing reforms see more inmates soon able to earn their way out of jail early.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the committee, told LBC: “Due to the government’s early release schemes and others, those electronic tags are likely to go up by another 22,000.

“We are questioning whether Serco, the company that provides that tagging, is ready for that huge increase.

“Our prisons are running at 98 per cent capacity meaning that more prisoners have got to be released into society, some of whom wouldn’t normally be released that early, but have to be because there aren’t enough prison places.”

Sentencing minister Jake Richards, though, told me: “We’ve increased the amount of money going into probation services and we always monitor and ensure that there is continuous improvement being delivered by the people who provide these tags.

“And my colleague James Timpson [the prisons minister] has been working with Serco to improve their performance and we’re in a position now where we’re very confident that it is much better than it was.

“And we are really confident in this technology - if you drink, whilst you’re wearing one of these, we’ll know straight away.”