National Offender Management Service
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The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) is a department of the Ministry of Justice responsible for the correctional services in England and Wales (separate arrangements exist in Scotland and Northern Ireland). It was created by combining parts of both of the headquarters of the National Probation Service and Her Majesty's Prison Service with some existing Home Office functions.
[edit] Creation
NOMS was created on 1 June 2004 following a review by Patrick Carter (now Lord Carter of Coles), a Labour-supporting businessman. Carter had been asked by the government to propose a way of achieving a better balance between the prison population in England and Wales and the resources available for the correctional services. He proposed three radical changes. Firstly, that there should be 'end-to-end management' of each offender from first contact with the correctional services to full completion of the sentence. Secondly, that there should be a clear division between the commissioners of services and their providers. And thirdly that there should be 'contestability' amongst these providers. By this means, he argued, efficiency would be increased, unit costs reduced, and innovation encouraged. Growth in the prison population, which had increased by two thirds over the previous ten years, would be constrained by giving the courts greater confidence in the effectiveness of community sentences as opposed to prison sentences through better management of offenders, leading to reduced levels of reoffending. The government accepted these proposals in full.
Helen Edwards succeeded Martin Narey as Chief Executive of NOMS in November 2005.
The emerging structure of NOMS saw the appointment of a Regional Offender Manager (ROM) for each of the 9 English regions and Wales. Their responsibilities included the negotiation and performance monitoring of Service Level Agreements with each of the public sector prisons and probation areas in their regions, and of contracts with private sector prisons. In addition to this commissioning role, they were also given responsibility for the reduction of reoffending in their regions, effected by the development of multi-agency partnerships which harnessed the capacity of other government departments, agencies, and local authorities to influence the factors which affect offending - drugs and alcohol, accommodation, employment training and education, children and families, health, finance debt and benefit, attitudes thinking and behaviour.
After a period characterised by changes of political leadership, crises about foreign national prisoners, and a burgeoning prison population, on 9 May 2007 the correctional services element of the Home Office was hived off to join the former Lord Chancellor's Department in the newly created Ministry of Justice. In early 2008, the Secretary of State for Justice announced major organisational reform which resulted in the Director General of Her Majesty's Prison Service becoming the Chief Executive of NOMS, and assuming responsibility for the National Probation Service NPS as well as the Prison Service. Apart from in early pilots for the merged services in London and Wales from 1 April 2008, Regional Offfender Managers lost their responsibility for public prisons, which reverted to HMPS. Responsibility for the contracted private prisons remains unclear. ROMs retained responsibility for probation areas in their regions, assuming a line management role in relation to both the chair of the probation board and its chief officer. On 1 April 2008, six probation areas' governing boards were redesignated as Probation Trusts, enjoying greater freedoms than their board counterparts but more susceptible to competition and possible loss of business should their performance prove to be intractably poor.
[edit] External links
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