I would like to reflect on the point raised by my hon. Friend. My principal concern is that we should not have in place structures that add delay to the process of providing courts with the pre-sentence reports that they need in order to make appropriate decisions about how which offenders are to be treated.

It might assist the Committee and my hon. Friend to know that the number of trained probation officers increased from 7,139 in 1998 to 7,506 in 2001; and the number of probation service officers increased from 1,895 in 1996 to 3,566 in 2001. One has only to add those figures together to see how many more staff are available to the probation service as it undertakes the wider and more demanding work that we are now asking of it.