LANCASHIRE is to get the electronic tagging of offenders by the end of the year.

Blackburn MP and Home Secretary Jack Straw announced to the Commons today that an experimental scheme in Greater Manchester was to be extended to neighbouring counties.

First in line will be Lancashire with Cheshire and West Yorkshire likely to follow suit.

Mr Straw said that while the pilot schemes had been increasingly successful as technical teething troubles had been ironed out, they did not justify the scheme going nationwide.

But they did justify widening the areas used in the trials as the next step in the experiment.

The move is part of Mr Straw's attempts to keep the prison population down by using effective forms of community sentencing.

Under the scheme, offenders are placed under curfew and movement restriction orders that are enforced by the tags which allow the police and probation service to check that they are meeting the conditions of their sentences. Mr Straw announced the stepping up of his drive to speed up the youth justice system and confirmed that repeat sex and violent offenders will face mandatory life prison sentences.

Three time drug dealers will be jailed automatically for at least sev en years.

But Mr Straw has dropped the previous government's proposals that three time burglars should face mandatory three year prison sentences as they would put too many small time criminals behind bars.

With the prison population at 62,000 and rising by 250 a month, Mr Straw has decided the Tory plan would put too much pressure on the jails.

Mr Straw said of tagging:"It go off to a shaky start but there is no question that in the pilot areas it has proved very successful." While he wants to end the systrem where young thugs aged 10 to 14are arrested up to 40 times without an action taken, he wants to nip offending in the bud by using tough community sentences early as opposed to prison.

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