I will try to be brief, because I had the opportunity to speak in a debate on the National Offender Management Service not long ago. Many things have moved on since then, however, and I hope that the Minister will be able to address them.

Last week, I was involved, with about 1,200 probation officers from throughout the country, in a lobby of Parliament. After the last debate that we had on NOMS, I received letters from probation officers throughout the country, echoing many of the concerns that had been raised. Something that came across to me clearly in speaking to probation officers last week was a degree of demoralisation. People feel extremely insecure about their future, and there is a danger that we will lose experienced staff who have been in the service for a long time.

It is difficult to think how the probation service will be able to recruit, train and retain staff if it is going to be a year until the final arrangements are in place. The degree of uncertainty is a serious problem. Change is happening at national and regional level, but many people have little clear idea where it is going.

I tabled an early-day motion on the subject, which has received more than 100 signatures from across the House. That shows the concern that many Members feel about what is happening. I suspect that many people who signed that early-day motion did so because they believe that they need to know more, and there has not been enough discussion of the changes in Parliament.

I shall concentrate most of my remarks on the latest Home Office paper, issued by Martin Narey on 10 May, which asked for responses by 11 June. The paper talks about being driven by the legislative timetable, but—I am sure that the Minister will correct me if I am wrong—my understanding is that there is no need for legislation on reorganising service delivery. If the Home Office wanted to change the structures of the probation service and the Prison Service, or to put them together, it would not need legislation to do so.

Legislation is required to deal with some of the management structures, such as probation boards. The abolition of probation boards will be one of the key features of any future legislation; I am not clear what else might be included. We do not necessarily need legislation to deal with some of the structures on the ground.

The implication of what is happening is that by the time we get to debate a Bill, which may be later this year, with a Second Reading in the new Session of Parliament, in November or December , we will have reached a point at which, whatever has happened to the structures on the ground, the regional management structures will already be in place. People will have been appointed as regional offender managers and someone will have been appointed as the national offender manager. We will have a management structure that does not fit with what has been happening, and Parliament will be presented with a fait accompli. I suspect that many Members of this House will not be too pleased about that. Whatever they feel about the Bill, they will be being asked to endorse something that has effectively already happened.

The paper asks for responses to quite a number of questions, and some of those raise even more questions. The structure shows a purchaser-provider split. The whole of the Prison Service is in the provider part, but a 70–30 split is proposed for current probation officers. Roughly 70 per cent. would go into the purchaser side, and about 30 per cent. would be on the provider side, although the purchaser side as it stands would include things such as human resources, finance and back-office support. I have seen comments suggesting that people in those parts of the service, at least, have no guarantees that they will remain on the purchaser side for ever.

I can certainly see the worries for people who think that they may end up on the provider side. Who will they compete with, and on what terms? Might we not even end up with competition between some of the people on that side, who all now work in the public service? For instance, some of the people who are now in the Prison Service might want to put in bids to do what is currently regarded as probation service work.

One of the things that I learnt from dealing with compulsory competitive tendering—and in this case, we are dealing with something much more complex and difficult than a local authority converting to CCT—is that the exercise of drawing up specifications and writing contracts is not neutral. The terms and conditions in contracts, and the specifications, have an enormous effect on who can bid for those contracts and win them. The areas covered, the geographical areas and the size of the contract can all have an enormous impact on who can win the contract. There is also the question of whether the contract is written in a way that makes it possible for in-house staff to bid and successfully win it.

People have been asked for views about the liaison arrangements below the regional tier, how work is carried out with local authorities, and the structures that currently exist. Questions about what should be happening at local and regional level should be answered in the paper, not asked.

We all accept that more needs to be done, although much progress has been made in the probation service. I ask the Minister to think again about the pace of what is happening, the level of consultation, the worries of staff, and parliamentary scrutiny.

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