"It's time to to align political power with democratic accountability"
CAPX: 14th May 2025: Elliott Keck's article offers some helpful stats and useful analysis on just how out of control Britain's quangocracy has become.
"The Institute for Government was sceptical, to say the least, in its initial response to Pat McFadden’s bonfire of the quangos. As it stated, ‘the number of bodies is the wrong measure of success’... can ‘create an illusion that major savings are being made when they aren’t’.
... new research from the TaxPayers’ Alliance... reveals the extent to which the quangocracy has spun out of control.
While the number of arms-length bodies has fallen precipitously, from 561 in 2012-13 to 304 in 2022-23, spending and staffing numbers have shot up dramatically... What looked like a bonfire of the quangos was really a great welding. We ended up with bigger bodies with more staff and funding that further diminished ministerial power...
...Spending by quangos in 2012-13 was a still chunky £100 billion, yet within just five years this soared to £272 billion, ending up at £344 billion in the latest year, 2022-23. Staffing increased from 239,000 to 391,000...
What’s really revealing though is how much quangos are now spending as a percentage of total public sector spending... In 2012-13 quangos made up 13.2% of public sector spending... this jumped up as high as 31.9%, even as the number of bodies was slashed by over 260. This settled at 29.6% in 2022-23.
...The problem with quangos is that ministers often don’t set the direction at all. They may appoint a chair, or chief executive. And they may technically be involved in building overall strategy. But in reality, we are talking about independent bodies with their own institutional interests, budgets and priorities. Often quangos don’t seem to care if they conflict with those of the elected politicians in question...
... Is the problem that, once created, they become untameable beasts wreaking havoc on our body politic? Or are they an excuse for ministers to delegate powers and responsibility, with their successors ultimately paying the price when things go wrong?
...Whichever view you take, though, the problem remains. If we want to align power with democratic accountability, the quangocracy needs to be taken down by more than a few pegs. Only we don’t need a bonfire of the quangos, we need to defang them."