ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the organisation and governance of probation will be discussed. There will be a short account of the creation of the National Probation Service and of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) and the influences that led to these developments. Discussion will then focus on the central vision for NOMS: an integration of prison and probation and an ‘opening up of the market’ for other service providers, through the mechanism of contestability. Both debates raise fundamental challenges about the relationship between the local and the national and about not only what NOMS should do, but what kind of organisation it ought to be (Faulkner 2007), prompting similar questions about probation.
