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Offender Management Bill

I cannot answer my hon. Friend, as I certainly have not found organisations keen to get involved in that. No doubt there are such organisations, but they may come from far away. That is always a danger. As I said earlier, the worry is that if the voluntary sector fails, the private sector will try to succeed; if that fails, we will be left in great difficulties because we will have broken the system. I leave my hon. Friend the Minister with the thought that contestability is at the kernel of my opposition to how the Bill is currently framed. What really disappoints me is the notion that underwrites the whole approach to NOMS: that the probation service can be dispensed with—that it is, in a sense, past its sell-by date and can easily be merged into the wider prison service. From talking to members of the probation service and visiting prisons, as we all do to talk to constituents or to draw evidence of what is happening in our penal service, my concern has always been about mixing up those who work in prison, and those who work outside it, but with the same people. I have worried that that will mean that staff lose flexibility to represent people in a different way. Nowhere in the Bill do I see any recognition of the dangers to which that may lead. Probation officers have always felt nervous about the whole concept of NOMS. That does not mean that in principle I am against some re-linking of our prisons with the probation service outside. However, the idea behind NOMS—that we assimilate everything into one system—has always led me to worry that we are adopting an untested, certainly untried, approach, which, if we go along the contestability route, will be unacceptable.