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Excerpt taken from Hansard (debate in House of Lords..24/01/08 3.38 pm
Lord Forsyth said: My Lords, I'm most grateful for the opportunity for this short debate. I will concentrate on
accountability and control of quangos and will try to keep my remarks brief.
In 1995, the then shadow Chancellor, a Mr Gordon Brown, vowed to make a bonfire of quangos and sweep away the quango
state.
In fact, under the aegis of this Admninistration, the quango state has grown enormously since 1997, with more
than 700 extra bodies created. Nor can this just be attributed to this Administration. The new Scottish Nationalist
Administration, elected in May on a promise to have a Scottish bonfire of quangos, has managed to create 24 new
quangos since taking up office despite that promise.
I have found it almost impossible to divine the extent of the quango state. The Economic Research Council has
published The Essential Guide to British Quangos and has an excellent database on its website. According to it, gross
expenditure grew from £146 billion in 2004 to £174 billion in 2006. The growth in staff numbers over the past decade
has been impressive, with many quangos more than doubling in size. The Student Loans Company, for example, employed
984 people in 2007 compared with 432 in 1998 and its costs have increased from £19 million to £57 million, a
threefold increase.
Spending on government and quango press officers alone has been estimated at more than £330 million, and the Nolan
rules on appointments have been good news for head-hunters and recruitment agencies.
In paragraphs 20 and 21 of its sixth report, the Select Committee on Public Administration recommended,
"that the Government brings together information about the range of organisations carrying out its policy in a
single directory, combining the information given at present in Public Bodies with other, summary information about
departmental roles, and how departments deliver policy through other bodies, and how all of these bodies relate to
one another".
That was in 1999, and the Government have done nothing, more than eight years on, to implement that simple and very sensible recommendation that would shine a light on the extent of the growth of quangos.
Indeed, the Government have moved backwards.
In 2006, they ended the publication of Public Bodies, the only—somewhat inadequate—directory of these bodies
available, arguing that the information would be available by going to each department’s website.
I have tried that. You could spend a lifetime mining the data on those websites and get nowhere close to the extent
of the quango state. Of course, the Government have something to hide. Far from abolishing the quango state, they
have nourished it and allowed it to get completely out of control. Quangos are used or established to hive off
difficult decisions by this Government.
This Government have created hundreds of task forces, action teams and working parties and has more tsars than the
Romanovs. The coincidental, I am sure, involvement of party supporters and donors does not help with its
credibility.