Group member:
YANYAN HE, HAINA WANG, PEI GU, WEIMO GAO, SHUYAN QIU
INTRODUCTION
The National Offender Management Service (NOMS), responsible for the National Probation Service and HM Prison Service, is an Executive Agency of the Ministry of Justice in United Kingdom. The role of NOMS is to commission and provide offender management services, to deliver the punishment and orders of the courts and to support rehabilitation by helping offenders to reform their lives within England and Wales.
However, in an increasingly global economy, a much debated issue these days is how to improve the efficiency in operation in the public sector. Further reforms of management practices, and of financial controls in particular, were held to required, with increasing emphasis placed on extending the financial accountability of service providers (Kurunmäki, 1999). Since the New Public Sector reforms in late 1980s, a more market-based and accountable management has been called for in the public sector to replace the traditional modes characterized by professionalism, bureaucracy and departmentalism. The aim of the New Public Sector reforms was to address a widespread perceived problem with the management of public sector organizations, and it achieved this goal by means of changing the allocation of financing for the publicly funded services by market based system. The following statement by the Chief Executive in NOMS reveals that the values of NOMS are quite in line with the objective of market-based New Public Sector reforms:
Now, under the Ministry of Justice’s Transforming Justice agenda, we are taking forward an ambitious reform programme – opening up public services to a wider base of providers and changing the way we fund and commission services so that we are focused on outcomes rather than processes, increasingly aiming to pay providers for the results they achieve.
(Michael Spurr, Chief Executive of
References: Meyer (1973), ‘The Accounting Entity,’ Abacus , 9(2), 116-126. Kurunmä ki (1999), ‘Making an Accounting Entity: The Case of the Hospital in Finnish Health Care Reforms,’ European Accounting Review , 8(2), 219-237. National Offender Management Service (NOMS). (2014), Annual Report, [Online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/322699/NOM S_AR_2014_web.pdf [Assessed: Oct 30th 2014]