Cutting number of quangos will not save money, say MPs

The UK government has “botched” its attempt to axe many of the current non-departmental public bodies known as quangos, failing to save much money or improve accountability, MPs are claiming.

MPs on the parliamentary select committee on public administration published a report on 7 January that heavily criticises the process to cut the number of these arm’s length bodies.

The government announced in October last year that it would axe 192 public bodies and that 118 would be merged. Those axed included the National Patient Safety Agency, the Health Protection Agency, and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisations. They will cease to exist as quangos, with their work subsumed within the Department of Health of England before the end of this parliament (BMJ 2010;341:c5819, doi:10.1136/bmj.c5819).

The functions of the Human Tissue Authority and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority will transfer to other regulators when they are axed.

The select committee’s report described the government’s “bonfire of the quangos” as a poorly managed process, resulting in badly drafted legislation that would not deliver significant cost savings or better accountability—two of the government’s key aims.

The report says that the government set up a series of tests to see what should happen to each quango but that none of those tests were about value for money or effectiveness. The tests had been applied inconsistently across different government departments, it says, because the Cabinet Office had failed to create a proper procedure for departments to follow.

There was also a serious lack of consultation, and neither the public nor many of the bodies to be abolished were consulted.

MPs on the committee said that if the government wanted to make meaningful savings in spending on public bodies it needed to examine not only how these organisations operated but why they existed. In many cases their functions should have been transferred to charities and mutuals—not for profit organisations with members that raise funds to provide common services to its members—which would have helped the government deliver its vision of a “big society.”

“This review has highlighted the complex and confusing nature of the public bodies landscape,” says the report. “The current system is chaotic, making it difficult to understand why different types of bodies exist and what these variations mean in practice.”

It recommends that the government, which intends to review quangos every three years, improve its processes.

Bernard Jenkin, the Conservative MP for Harwich and North Essex and the committee’s chairman, said, “The whole process was rushed and poorly handled and should have been thought through a lot more.

“This was a fantastic opportunity to help build the big society and save money at the same time, but it has been botched. The government needs to rethink which functions public bodies need to perform.”

The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We are not going to claim that this process has been perfect . . . but if you take over government in these circumstances where the government has, in the words of the last chief secretary [Liam Byrne] ‘run out of money,’ we had to get on with things. Has it been a perfect process? No.”