NOMS to HMPPS: Rebadging or Real Reform ?

So the National Offender Management Service is no more, to be replaced by Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. Is it a rebadging of what is perceived as an unloved and unlovely bureaucratic monster with a more transparent and comforting title? Or a more significant shift in responsibilities which will lead to real change?

There are undoubtedly highly positive elements in in the Truss reforms; long overdue investment in staff not only of resources but professional training and status. There will be a greater focus on women in the criminal justice system- much needed although we’ll have to see whether adding the responsibility to an existing role will bring about the far reaching reforms that are urgently required.

For some in the probation world, the hope of a quickie divorce from their forced marriage to prisons has been dashed although the new arrangements could lead to a conscious uncoupling in due course. Much depends on the review of the reformed system which will report in the spring.

But what of prisons? The Prison Safety and Reform White Paper makes no mention of replacing NOMS. It’s in the design of the reformed prison system in paragraph 68. HMPPS will be an Executive Agency like NOMS. It will continue with the core of its business – managing prisons -but be stripped of its role in commissioning services, making policy and it seems monitoring performance.  From April these functions will move to the Ministry of Justice.  Agreements between individual prisons and the MoJ will also come into play although in an unpromising start, the Prison Governors Association have advised their members not to sign them. Despite the White Paper’s promise of negotiation, there apparently hasn’t been any.

Although the new arrangements promise clarity, there are still many questions. Is it sensible to split commissioning and contract management between the MoJ and HMPPS?  Where will Electronic monitoring fit? And where will the line on policy development be drawn? The Prison service instructions introduced last year included guidance on preventing corruption, the interception of communications, faith and pastoral care for prisoners, searching of cells and the care of transgender prisoners. We have been promised a bonfire of these instructions although almost all look important and most essential. Some may be better informed by policy wonks in the Ministry of Justice but most need experienced operational input. 

One of NOMS biggest critics argued it was “dangerously out of touch with its operational heartland”. In that respect the new arrangements could make things worse not better.