October 14, 2005: Napo Call: End Probation Crisis

At its 93rd Annual General Meeting, probation union Napo's chair Rob Thomas was highly critical of Government plans for the National Offender Management Service and opposed oppose moves to dismantle and privatise the Probation Service. On the creation of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS ), he labelled service a "nightmare", continuing:

"We are now 21 months on since it was first announced. We still have no design document for the ‘end state’ as they fondly call it. We still have no draft Management of Offenders Bill. The man who was originally charged by the Government with creating NOMS has left the agency after 18 months and there is still no business case.”

“NOMS is a bureaucratic disaster. Probation Areas have been told they must spend valuable resources on helping set up Regional Contestability Boards. Every Probation Area is also being encouraged to set up a Business Unit. This is all a prelude to contestability, or privatisation, which is what it really is. This is all a criminal waste of money and valuable staff resources. The real agenda is market forces and the setting up of a system which could see Probation services go out of business altogether. In Napo’s view the Government is obliged to account for all the reasons it is spending these colossal sums of money.”

On sentencing, he added:

“The continued timidity of this Government over sentencing practices means that there has been no serious action to persuade sentencers to stop sending people to prison. This means we now have an all time record high of 77,000 people in prison, and rising. This puts intolerable pressure on our colleagues working in prisons and increases Probation work loads when prisoners are released and makes it more difficult to help people we supervise, whether they are on license or a community order.”