Quangos are like rhododendrons

One of the advantages, or disadvantages, of being in your 40s is that you keep getting that seen-it-all-before feeling. Fashions come round time and time again, and not just in clothes.

I can't remember how old I was when I first heard a politician promising to rid the country of quangos but it was well before I was old enough to know what a quango is. As David Walker says in today's Guardian, every time politicians pretend to close them down, they quietly reappear in another guise.

[G]overnments of all stripes find "non-departmental public bodies" too useful, both as tools to manipulate free of most civil service constraints and, in case of failure, as readily identifiable whipping boys.

The UK and its constituent territories are governed through a jigsaw puzzle of arm's-length agencies, numbered in their hundreds and, if the definition includes advisory committees and so on, thousands. A wise report from the Commons public administration committee nine years ago concluded that these would always be with us.

The quangos won't disappear for the same reason as the state bureaucracy as a whole won't shrink. People expect more and more from the state and they are encouraged to do so by the same tabloids that call for tax cuts. Whether it is the murder of a child entrusted to inappropriate carers, or something more mundane like abandoned cars or stray dogs, every time the papers scream 'something must be done', someone has to do it and that is either a government department or, often, a quango.

Announcing a cull of quangos is always popular until the specific services to be cut are identified, then there is an outcry and the proposals are inevitably watered down.

The Tories will make a big deal of cutting back on quangos but, somehow, after ten years or so, there will still be as many, if not more. Then New New New Labour will get in again and proclaim their war on quangos.

As David Walker says, quangos are like rhododendrons. They quickly grow back.

Comments

[Edwin Greenwood]

Believe me, Steve, by the time you get to 60 you will feel that not only have you seen it all before, but you've seen all the re-runs on UK Gold as well!

[Cabalamat]

Yep.

It's the same in computing, BTW, where in client-server systems there have been several iterations of fashions for doing it on the client or doing it on the server.

[Edwin Greenwood]

...or doing all processing in the CPU versus delegating to intelligence in individual peripherals.

[Mark Wadsworth]

Announcing a cull of quangos is always popular until the specific services to be cut are identified

Ah yes, but quangos don't provide services. You can't ring them up and ask them to deal with noisy neighbours or repair the drains or teach your kids to read and write or anything. If you took them all out and shot them, nobody would notice the difference.

[monkey]

Black Sheep/Rastaman said...
Steve over at P. Phil. says Oh Noooo, he never censored me. Yet this is what I get every time I leave a comment:

"We're sorry, your comment has not been published because TypePad's antispam filter has flagged it as potential comment spam. It has been held for review by the blog's author."

And this occurred directly after I criticised a post of his. I've left a couple dozen comments and always get the same message.

Feel like mentioning this to him?

03 September 2008 03:15

what going on here steve?

[Andrew Duffin]

My personal favourite in this particular context is that ever since I can remember (which is about 45 years I think) there has been only thirty years' supply of oil left in the world.

Oddly enough, there still is.