"Multibillion pound 'shambolic' penal agency to be axed" by Jamie Doward , The Observer

23rd September 2007

The government was accused last night of presiding over a 'shambolic penal policy' after it emerged it is to dismantle its multibillion pound flagship programme to protect the public and cut crime.

The National Offender Management Service (Noms) was set up three years ago to provide a single organisation responsible for the supervision of offenders throughout the criminal justice system. It is charged with overseeing the prisons and probation service and aims to have made a 'significant reduction in reoffending rates by 2010'.

But it has been dogged by controversy, with prison overcrowding near to record levels and reoffending rates running at close to all-time highs. A project to install a computer system to track offenders was suspended this summer over concerns it did not work.

Now a confidential review of the service, the contents of which have been disclosed to The Observer, has concluded it should be broken up. The organisation will instead be divided up and subsumed into other parts of the Ministry of Justice.

The findings of the Organisational Review of the Ministry of Justice, spearheaded by Ursula Brennan, a senior civil servant, represent a huge embarrassment for the government, which in the past has made bullish claims about the service.

A five-year Home Office strategy for the service, unveiled in 2005, claimed that Noms 'will mean far better success in giving offenders a chance to change and cutting re-offending'.

But the review's findings, articulated in a terse, six-page report to be presented to ministers in October, will be seized on by government critics who claim the system has become an unwieldy bureaucracy, incapable of fulfilling its role.

Figures show the cost of running the service is now almost £900m a year. The probation union, Napo, claims the Noms budget has increased by 556 per cent since 2005.

'We've already seen the collapse of the IT system which underpinned Noms,' said Nick Herbert, the shadow Secretary of State for Justice. 'Now the government's flagship organisation could effectively be dismantled after just three years. With overflowing jails, violent prisoners being released early on to the streets, and soaring rates of re-offending, the government's penal policy has become a shambles.'

The review acknowledges its plan will be seen as the 'end of Noms', and therefore a failure, but it argues subsuming the organisation into the Ministry of Justice is the most viable option available. It recommends the ministry should establish two departments to oversee the offender management system, one responsible for developing policy, the other for implementing it.

But the plan has been interpreted in certain quarters as an attempt to split up the Ministry of Justice only months after it was hived off from the Home Office. 'Operations and policy are intricately linked,' said Harry Fletcher, the assistant general secretary of Napo. 'The history of the Home Office shows you separate them at your peril.'

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice declined to comment on the review's findings.