Today at the TaxPayers' Alliance we've released a new report on the range and scale of the semi-autonomous bodies (SAPBs) that do so much of the work of government these days. The 1,152 national SAPBs (the term "quango" is responsible for a lot of the confusion that surrounds this issue) employ over half a million staff and spend more than £90 billion.
There are a series of problems with so much of government being conducted through these organisations:
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Accountability. Too often, SAPBs are used to avoid Ministers being held to account for the performance of public services. The SATs fiasco, and the Government's attempt to avoid its share of responsibility for that failure, is a classic example of this problem.
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Once SAPBs are established they are incredibly difficult to kill off, even if they aren't performing, and their cost and scale tends to grow. Regional Development Agencies are a good example of this, as we set out in our earlier report The Case for Abolishing Regional Development Agencies (PDF).
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A lot of the taxpayer funded politics in our recent report (PDF) on Taxpayer Funded Lobbying and Political Campaigning was supported by SAPBs.
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There have been ongoing concerns at the amount of cronyism in the SAPB sector. Forthcoming TPA research will be exploring this problem in much more depth.
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Too many SAPBs replicate the work of other SAPBs, local government or the central government departments.
The Conservatives need to be a lot more ambitious about cutting back SAPBs. In our recent work with the IoD and today's report we've suggested some dead wood which could be used to start a decent sized bonfire.
