Ben Farrugia: Promising to ring-fence the international aid budget seems naive when you consider that 14% of DfID's budget never reaches those for whom it is intended

Ben Farrugia is Deputy Research Director at the TaxPayers' Alliance and author of Lost along the way: The cost of the UK’s international development programme, which is published today by the TPA.  

International development isn’t some sort of luxury item. Although cuts in Government expenditure are inevitable, it would be wrong – and short sighted – to make drastic cuts in the UK’s overseas assistance budget. Our contribution to the world’s efforts can do some good, and not only in preventing catastrophes. If money is spent right, progress in even the most difficult countries is possible.

However Conservative promises to ring-fence the development budget are misconceived. The current approach to development – embodied by DfID – is not delivering the progress that many had hoped, and while the challenges are certainly great, for the money that’s been invested over the past decades there are too few genuine success stories. 

Nor is the current approach cheap. In the new TaxPayers’ Alliance report, Lost along the way, we estimate that in 2007-08 over £729 million – 14% of DfID’s total budget – never made it to the people and communities for whom it was intended. For the chain between UK taxpayer and aid recipient is complex. DfID itself only directly manages around half of its own budget (£2.4 billion in 2007-08), which is divided between humanitarian assistance (i.e. emergency relief), technical assistance and budget support.

Most of the other half of DfID’s spending is directed towards – or through – its big multilateral partners:  the EU, World Bank, UN. Such large bureaucratic structures enable better coordination of donor effort, but they also cost a bit to maintain. In 2007-08 (the most recent year for which data was available when the report was written) the average administrative cost of such multilateral organisations was 17.6% of their total budget.

It is a similar story with the NGOs through which DfID does a lot of its on-the-ground work, and through which it spends the remainder of its budget. These bodies received over £313 million in 2007-08, but again a significant proportion – 17% – went on costs not directly linked to their front-line activities. 

Ben Farrugia: Cut £2bn from small business taxation by abolishing Regional Development Agencies

Ben Farrugia is a Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance and is a co-author of the report “The Case for Abolishing the Regional Development Agencies” (PDF). You can join the TaxPayers’ Alliance for free here.

Since they were set up in 1999, the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) have spent a huge amount of money - £15.3 billion to be precise – but have they achieved anything?

The claimed achievements of the RDAs are notoriously difficult to pin down, with their own published figures for “jobs created” or “investment attracted” often involving them taking credit for the total exploits of businesses who may just have received a letter or two from the RDA and no more.

To properly assess the performance of these quangos it is necessary to look at the economic data over time. To that end, the TaxPayers’ Alliance have studied in detail the official statistics for job numbers, employment levels, new businesses and economic growth for England’s regions back to 1992, allowing us to compare regional performance in the seven years before RDAs were created and in the seven years after.

The findings are shocking: in the vast majority of measures, across the vast majority of regions, the English regions were developing faster before RDAs were introduced. In many areas, development and growth has slowed in 1999-2006 compared to 1992-1999. In some, the regions are actually worse off than before. Overall the gap between England’s richest regions and the poorest has grown – hardly a testament to the success of the quango-based strategy.

Ben Farrugia: Britain's unseen £64 billion state

Ben Farrugia is a Policy Analyst at the TaxPayers’ Alliance.  In this Platform piece he examines the dizzying scale and £64bn cost of Britain's 1,162 quangoes.

Five years ago, the Public Administration Select Committee strongly recommended that the Government compile and publish a list of all the quangos, agencies and other unelected bodies that exist in the UK. Given that the Government has chosen to ignore that recommendation, we at the TaxPayers’ Alliance have produced that list (PDF) for them, to allow the public to truly appreciate the sheer size and scope of Government in Britain.

People have of course been aware for some years that quangos have been on the rise, with ever larger portions of taxpayers’ money and public policy being passed out of democratic control and into the hands of a myriad of bodies. But most will still be shocked by the true extent of Britain’s unseen government. Like an iceberg, whose vast mass lies hidden beneath the water line, the familiar quangos represent only a small part a whole unknown layer of government.

The full picture is staggering. Alongside the departments directly controlled by Westminster and the devolved assemblies, and those duties overseen by local government, there exists a convoluted hierarchy of agencies and quangos, hundreds of bodies existing to implement specific aspects of government policy. The TPA’s research has uncovered no fewer than 1,162 of these bodies, in receipt of over £64 billion of taxpayers’ money and employing almost 700,000 people. This is the most comprehensive survey of the quango industry ever compiled, but there are no doubt other bodies yet to be identified.