THE Government may merge prison and probation to create a single correctional service to ensure better punishment and management of offenders.

Ministers want to create a seamless approach between time spent in prison and the supervision of offenders in the community in an effort to curb reoffending. The drive for closer co-operation will become more important with the introduction of “custody plus” punishment in which offenders will serve part of their sentence in prison and part in the community.

Martin Narey, the new Commissioner for Correctional Services, discloses in The Times today that a merger is on the agenda. In an exclusive interview for The Times’s Public Agenda section, he said: “Ministers think it may be a possibility but no one has taken a position on that yet.”

A merger of the two services would be no small task, although significantly the Home Office and ministers already use the term correctional services in titles and literature.

Mr Narey admitted that until recently communication between the two services had been limited and that cultural differences and hostility between them remained.

But the recent creation of a National Probation Service with a director-general in Whitehall would make it easier to merge with the nationally led Prison Service.

A review of correctional services is being led by Pat Carter, a businessman, and monitored by the policy unit at 10 Downing Street.

A proposed merger is likely to be resisted by probation staff, who are nervous about Mr Narey’s new role as overlord of both prisons and probation. One Whitehall source said last night: “The Probation Service is a very different body from the Prison Service. The people employed in it work within the community.”

Mr Narey’s remarks came as overcrowding and staff shortages at Pentonville prison were blamed for the jail having the most impoverished regime in England and Wales, according to a report published today. Some prisoners in the Victorian North London jail were found to be having only one shower and one change of underwear a week. Education and workshops were underused. Only 20 per cent of the 1,113 prisoners had access to lessons. On one day during a snap inspection only one prisoner reached the education department despite provision for 50 to be in class.

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