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Government delivered warnings over quango cull

The Government has closed 106 quangos so far as part of its “reform programme”, Francis Maude has announced.

Mr Maude said the closures, along with the merging of 150 bodies into around 70, would stand to save the taxpayer £2.6bn.

The Minister for the Cabinet Office said: “In 2010 we inherited a bloated quangocracy that had spiralled out of control. Not only were these unaccountable bodies costing the taxpayer billions, but they were duplicating bureaucracy.

So far the Government have closed some of the biggest bodies, including RDAs; school bodies; canals and waterways; and The Child Support Agency.

Simon Bedford, head of public sector practice at Deloitte in the North West, said: “The update shows that while reducing the number of quangos is achievable, delivering on-going savings as a result is far more difficult.

“Many quangos deliver services that cannot be stopped overnight. Careful planning is needed to ensure that the appropriate activities can be picked up and delivered more efficiently elsewhere and costs are not just transferred back into central departments. While this would increase accountability, it may not achieve the level of financial savings anticipated.”

Tom Gash, Programme Director at the Institute for Government and co-author of Read Before Burning, said: “Francis Maude claimed the primary exercise here was not about saving money, but improving the accountability and effectiveness of quangos, but today we hear about billions of savings through a slash and burn exercise.

“If the figures do stand up to scrutiny and there has been no decrease in government performance in services, this is a good thing but the reliability of the savings claimed is questionable. Slash and burn exercises have proved counter-productive in the past and can even incur more costs in the long-run, as we argued in our report Read Before Burning. Savings or not, the real problem still remains – that government departments do not manage their quangos as effectively as they could.

“As the NAO reported earlier this year, the government does not have a robust way of measuring and tracking savings and there appears to have been no attempt to assess whether these savings had had an impact on performance. It’s also not clear whether savings couldn’t have been achieved without the disruption of dozens of time-consuming structural reorganisations.”

John Trickett MP, Labour’s Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, added: “This so-called clampdown is not what it seems.

“The true picture of David Cameron’s Government is of a failed economic plan which has delivered a double-dip recession and £150 billion more borrowing than they planned. Far from cutting bureaucracy they’ve launched an unwanted and wasteful upheaval of the NHS, creating a new NHS Commissioning Board, which David Cameron has been warned “could turn into the greatest quango in the sky” while the NHS is losing nurses at a rate of 200 per month.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .