"Briefing: quango spending over time"
The Taxpayers' Alliance: 12th May 2025: A new briefing revealing how the amount of UK taxpayers money controlled by 'arm's length bodies' (quangos) has risen over the past fifteen years.
"In April 2025, the government announced that it was going to scrap the Valuation Office Agency, folding its functions into HM Revenue & Customs. This followed announcements the previous month that NHS England, the ‘world’s largest quango’, and the Payment Systems Regulator would also be brought into the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and the Financial Conduct Authority respectively. Fifteen years since the coalition government pledged a ‘bonfire of the quangos’, the current Labour government is once again considering abolishing hundreds of existing quangos – even as it creates new ones.
There is no single definition of a quango, however the Cabinet Office semi-regularly publishes data on what it calls ‘public’ or ‘arm’s length’ bodies (ALBs), which exist outside of direct ministerial control. This currently comprises non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), executive agencies and non-ministerial departments, although previously it has included public corporations, nationalised industries and even NHS trusts.
While the number of these bodies has been falling over time as successive governments have pledged to reduce them, that does not automatically mean that the amount of spending outside direct ministerial control has shrunk. This note goes beyond the number of ALBs and examines how the sector has evolved over the past four decades, including how many staff they employ and how much they spend."
Key findings of the briefing include:
Quangos spent £343.6 billionin 2022-23, a 243 per cent increase from a decade ago in 2012-13.
Quango spending represented 29.6 per cent of public sector spending in 2022-23, more than double what it was a decade ago [13.2 per cent in 2012-13].
As a share of the economy, quango spending was 13.3 per cent of UK GDP in 2022-23. This represents a larger share of the economy than the financial and insurance services sector which was just 8.8 per cent of total economic output in 2023...