A PRIVATE security firm is criticised today for failings in its electronic monitoring of a teenage armed robber who murdered a jeweller.

Premier Monitoring Services did not inform youth workers that Peter Williams had repeatedly breached his curfew and had at times removed the electronic tag which was being used to follow his movements.

An official inquiry into the supervision of Williams, who is serving a minimum 22 years for the murder of Marian Bates, also censures the youth-offending team which was supposed to be looking after him.

The case manager in charge had no formal qualifications in youth work, probation or social work, according to the report by the Chief Inspector of Probation. Her previous experience amounted to voluntary work with disadvantaged children.

Yet the youth-offending team (YOT) in Nottingham put her in charge of Williams, who had a criminal history dating back to the age of 11 and a troubled family background.

The report lists a catalogue of failings by the YOT and Premier Monitoring which left Williams, who was supposed to be supervised and tagged after being released from custody on licence, free to commit crime.

It stops short, however, of saying that Mrs Bates would still be alive if those responsible had done their jobs properly.

The report makes no recommendations for disciplinary action against YOT staff, but Premier will be fined for breaking the terms of its contract with the probation service.

Williams, now 19, was jailed for life earlier this year for the murder of Mrs Bates, 64, who was shot dead in her family’s jewellers in Nottingham on September 30, 2003. She was shot through the chest as she shielded her daughter Xanthe, now 36, from armed robbers.

James Brodie was named by police as the gunman but has never been caught and is thought to have been killed by other criminals. Williams was his accomplice, and helped the escape by attacking Mrs Bates’s husband Victor with a crowbar.

Mr Bates, 66, said that the report exposed the incompetence of those in charge and added that tagging young offenders was a “complete waste of time”. Williams, a cocaine addict, had been released from a young offender institution on licence 20 days before Mrs Bates’s murder. In that time he missed at least seven appointments with probation workers and police. The case manager should have begun proceedings to send him back to jail after only two breaches.

Williams had also breached a curfew order — monitored by his electronic tag — on at least six occasions. However, Premier failed to inform his YOT of this until the morning of Mrs Bates’s murder, by which time he had removed the tag.

But the inquiry by probation bosses said that even if that had been done, he could not have been returned to custody in time to prevent the murder.

Mr Bates said of the report: “It is a complete whitewash. Everybody is incompetent, but nobody is to blame. How can that be? It is a collective failure of the system and of the tagging system, which is a complete waste of time.”

Mr Bates sold the shop in January following another attempted armed robbery.

Andrew Bridges, Chief Inspector of Probation, said: “The Youth Offending Team would have done their job properly if the case manager had identified when Williams was in breach and had acted on it in time. Furthermore, her managers did not supervise her work effectively enough.”

He added: “Finally, the fact that Premier failed to notify the YOT of Williams’s curfew breaches shows that they had an inadequate understanding of their responsibilities.”

Baroness Scotland, the Home Office minister, said: “We must now strengthen our procedures urgently, both nationally and in the way that offenders are managed locally, and do as much as possible to avoid similar incidents occurring in the future.”

A Premier spokesman said: “This was an isolated case, where mistakes were made through a failure of our procedures. The report identifies a number of recommendations for the other parties involved and we will work closely with them to assist in the process of implementing these.”

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