Just before Christmas a couple of thieves broke into the underground car park in a block of flats in north London and helped themselves to quite a few bikes. Around the same time a frail 77-year-old woman was recalled to prison because her wrists were too small.
Bear with me as I weave a connection between the two.
I was, as we say, a “victim” in the first incident. A few days later I had a phone call from the Met Police’s victim support unit to check I was OK. I said I was bearing up.
More to my surprise, an actual copper rang me a few days ago to say he was investigating the theft—totalling maybe £10,000 worth of bikes and equipment. And then, a few days later, he rang me again to say they were closing the file.
But this is not one of those pieces that rants against the woke police for not doing their job. My suspicion is that Camden police are grossly over-stretched and underfunded. The copper at the other end of the phone was doing his best in the circumstances. The cards were stacked against him.
Now to Gaie Delap, who happens to be my local vicar’s aunt. She is one of that small cadre of humans who are so worried about the coming climate crisis that they chain themselves to things, throw soup or climb motorway gantries. Beyond irritating if you’re hoping for a peaceful visit to the national gallery or if you’re stuck on the M25, but hardly up there with the Krays. Or even the morons who stole my bike.
Thanks to Suella Braverman climate protestors can now expect little mercy from the courts and so it was that Gaie, 77, was jailed for 20 months in August—a sentence denounced by her MP, Carla Denyer, for being disproportionate, unjust and a waste of resources.
You can’t help feeling Denyer has a point, given that the cost of locking up Gaie will have been around £50,000 a year—which is roughly what it would cost to send your child to Harrow or Cheltenham Ladies’ College.
You may also have noticed that, about the time they originally banged up Gaie, the the government was forced to release some 1,700 offenders on the grounds that there were literally no cells left for, say, bank robbers or bike thieves. In the unlikely event that anyone actually gets nicked for stealing bikes these days.
Long story short: in a rare moment of common sense Gaie was released in mid-November on what’s called home detention curfew. But then it turned out that an electronic tag could not be fitted to her leg because of deep vein thrombosis, and it was the wrong size for her wrists. She would therefore have to go back to prison.
The state outsources the tagging of prisoners to an unlovely company called Serco, notwithstanding an unpleasant hiccup in 2019 when it was fined nearly £23m as part of a settlement with the Serious Fraud Office over the way it had been carrying out its electronic tagging contracts.
This was most unfortunate, coming as it did on the heels of paying a £70m settlement to the Ministry of Justice some six years earlier after the firm and fellow outsourcing group G4S faced allegations of charging for tagging people who were either dead, in jail or had left the country.
No Serco executives spent so much as a day in jail for these unfortunate lapses. A previous Serco group chief executive, Rupert Soames, said that he and his colleagues were “mortified, embarrassed and angry” at what had happened.
It’s remarkable how shelling out £93m can save corporate wrongdoers from doing time.
Back to Gaie, who doesn’t have that sort of money. It turns out that Serco’s recall papers, which led to the pensioner being returned to prison, wrongly blamed Gaie for not being able to wear the tag: “refused to install,” they said. That, her family asserts, was a fabrication.
In fact, according to Gail’s supporters, it was a simply a case of inflexibility in fitting sizes for wristbands. One was too tight, another too loose.
Now imagine you are Mark Irwin, the overall UK boss at Serco. By early December, Gaie’s impending return to prison was becoming something of a political hot potato, with the prisons minister, James Timpson, declining to intervene. You might think that Irwin, in order to save a frail 77-year old from returning to prison over Christmas, would instruct his team to come up with a creative solution. That why he earns the big bucks.
Did I say big bucks? Forgive me if I digress for a moment to ruminate on just how big Irwin’s bucks are. Keep in mind the traditional benchmark of the prime minister’s salary, which is £172,153.
We are not in the same ballpark.
The Serco boss’s financial arrangements are helpfully detailed in a 138-page remuneration report, which makes for eye-watering reading. In 2023, during which Serco made a pre-tax profit of £247m, Irwin received a salary of £824,000, which was just a start. On top of that he received a gargantuan bonus of £1.036m, taking him to very nearly £2m for the year, or nearly 12 times the pay of the prime minister.
On top of that—if I have read the small print right—Irwin owned £4m worth of shares in the company (as of December 2023) and has a long-term incentive plan in place, which was topped up to the tune of £1.6m in April 2023. And, thumbing through the report, it turns out that Rupert Soames—the one who was so mortified by his previous colleagues’ behaviour—collected £1.8m on his way out of the door in December 2022.
So Serco is an extremely generous company—and very thoughtful in the way its lays out the grounds for rewarding Irwin so handsomely. If only Irwin had been equally thoughtful in trying to come up with a solution for the mismatch between his company’s electronic monitoring tags and the wrist size of a frail 77-year-old.
Timppon is on record saying that a lot of people in prison simply shouldn’t be there. It is self-evidently fatuous, in all the circumstances, that Gaie should still be locked up. Our prisons are at bursting point. A police constable in Camden has no chance of nicking a bike thief. And Serco is laughing all the way to the bank.
This is, in short, a parable of a criminal justice system that is broken. Gaie turns 78 on 10th January. Is it too much to hope that Irwin might, within the next week, come up with a creative solution that could see her freed?
