Offender Management Bill

My Lords, I understand why the noble Lord has anxieties about that. The transition from probation boards to probation trusts will be phased, probably over a three-year period. We are working to achieve the first trusts from April 2008. The number of trusts will be driven by the numbers who meet the objective criteria on which we are consulting. We anticipate that only a small number will make the transition from boards to trusts in the first phase, so the regional arrangements would remain the same. We do not anticipate that there will be a large reduction in the number of trusts compared with the number of boards because we will do it in this staged way. We are taking a very cautious approach—