LONDON — Labour’s policy of tagging prisoners and releasing them early provoked a fresh scandal yesterday night after Britain’s Home Office disclosed that more than 1,000 had committed violent offenses, including murder.

Figures submitted to a House of Commons committee are the first official acknowledgment of the extent of serious offenses carried out by prisoners freed on home detention curfew (HDC).

The scheme allows convicts to be released up to four and a half months earlier than they would normally be paroled, which is half-way through their sentence in most cases. Thousands of criminals have benefited from the scheme, which has been running since 1999, primarily to relieve population pressures on prisons and avert the sort of crisis that the Home Office is now facing.

A report from the Commons public accounts committee shows that 1,021 serious offenses were committed by prisoners who would otherwise still have been in jail between the scheme’s inception and the end of last year.

They include a murder, four manslaughters, one attempted murder, 56 woundings, 500 assaults, 145 attacks on police officers and 100 possessions of an offensive weapon. It is thought that thousands more minor offences have also been committed. The identity of the murderer was not clear, although Peter Williams, who was convicted of the murder in 2003 of Marian Bates, 64, a Nottingham jeweler, was on a tag as part of his community sentence — though not on the HDC scheme.

The report also shows that the taxpayer paid more than £8,000 to two inmates in compensation for returning them to prison — even though they had not completed their sentences — because it was wrongly assumed that they had tampered with their electronic tagging devices.

“The offenders claimed that their tags had been damaged accidentally,” it says. “At that time the Home Office’s policy was not to retain damaged equipment for appeals and, as a result, when the offenders appealed they could not prove whether the tags had been damaged intentionally.

“The Home Office paid £5,400 to one offender and £2,700 to another in recognition of their additional time spent in prison.”

A further £200,000 a year was wasted on assessments at the homes of criminals who were ineligible to take part in the HDC scheme.

The committee accepts that “failures in the system”can result in dangerous offenders being free to reoffend, because the tag itself cannot prevent offenders from reoffending.

Its report says: “In one tragic case, a youth offender on tag was convicted of murder. To minimize the risks to the public, the system has to be robust enough to prevent the release of offenders who are likely to reoffend whilst on curfew.

“Satellite tracking, which is being piloted, is likely to be useful in providing evidence of an offender being in a particular location when a crime is committed. The use of electronic monitoring is also being piloted for monitoring the whereabouts of asylum seekers.”

Extending home detention curfew is an option for the Home Office as it tries to cope with the growing number of prisoners. Jails in England and Wales now have almost 80,000 inmates, which is close to the maximum capacity.

Home Secretary John Reid announced emergency measures this week to tackle the crisis, including the release of some 250 police cells for convicted and remand prisoners and incentives of up to £2,500 to encourage foreign prisoners to return home.