June 1, 2004: National Offender Management Service: It's Official

The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) was officially established today (1 June, 2004). Surprisingly, particularly in view of the scale of the new service, this date almost escaped media notice - the only mainstream press comments being short pieces in the Independent and the Scotsman.

NOMS, headed by Chief Executive Martin Narey, will be a single service, with around 65,000 public sector staff and an initial budget of £3.2 billion. The government states that NOMS’s central purpose is the reduction of re-offending through more consistent and effective offender management. The Carter review of correctional service in January 2004 stated that if government failed to act to rebalance the system we would, by the end of the decade, have 93,000 people in prison and 300,000 on community sentences. The government believes that by rebalancing the system the prison population can be held at around 80,000.

According to Home Office Prisons and Probation minister Paul Goggins, NOMS:

“provides a once in a generation opportunity to revolutionise the way we treat offenders and challenge offending behaviour.”

Probation staff union NAPO disagrees. It takes the view that:

“NOMS is not about merging the prison and probation services; nor about creating a new streamlined single employing body, to oversee the management of offenders. NOMS is actually about increasing the number of employers involved in offender management. It is about pitting these employers - public, private and voluntary sector - against each other, in a competitive framework dubbed "contestability", in order to drive down costs.” (NAPO NOMS campaign bulletin no. 9)