MPs have called for the National Offender Management Service to be reviewed after finding that it had led an 'incoherent' tendering process for some probation services.
The Commons justice select committee today criticised the ‘very large and incoherent’ areas used for the tendering of community service contracts where organisations, including probation trusts and private sector firms, are currently bidding to Noms to run community payback schemes.
The committee said that the tendering process for the schemes, where six cross‑regional lots of contracts in England and Wales are being put out to tender, should ‘not be a model for future commissioning’.
Earlier this month the Ministry of Justice announced that more offender services would be put out to tender in the next year, both in prisons and the community, with the aim of six contracts being in place by 2015.
The committee said that in probation services, which are responsible for overseeing offenders released from prison on licence and those on community sentences, there is ‘significant scope’ to increase the contribution of private and voluntary sector organisations.
However,The role of the ProbationService report states that the experience of the community service contracts across the country has ‘not inspired confidence that Noms understands its business sufficiently well to draw up robust contracts that meet the needs of future stakeholders’.
It calls on government to undertake an external review of Noms, adding that its creation, which effectively merged prison and probation services in 2004, had not led to an appreciable improvement in the ‘joined-up’ treatment of offenders.
The report adds that the new commissioning models, including payment by results, are untested in criminal justice.
The committee report also revealed that up to three-quarters of probation officers’ time is spent on administration work that does not involve direct engagement with offenders, a finding the MPs called ‘staggering’.
Committee chair Sir Alan Beith said: ‘The ability of probation professionals to undertake effective work directly with offenders has been hindered by a tick-box culture imposed by the National Offender Management Service which has focused predominantly on prisons and has micro-managed probation.’
Responding to the report, probation and prisons minister Crispin Blunt said ‘the culture of target-setting and box-ticking is over’.
He said: ‘I heartily agree that the Probation Service needs to be freed up from unnecessary red tape, in order to focus on reducing the appalling rates of reoffending. Half of the people we release from our jails are reconvicted within a year of getting out. That's why we're making changes to enable Probation Officers to use their judgement and discretion more widely.’
