Edmund Burke once told his constituents “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” This speaks to an unresolved debate on the role of an MP — are they elected simply to represent the views of their constituents, or are they elected to act in what they believe to be the interests of their constituents and their nation?
Well, at least that is a debate about the extent to which an MP should listen to his or her constituents at any moment. That feels increasingly quaint of a topic. The debate now is to what extent MPs should listen to the experts and whether MPs should simply act as the formal rubber stampers for expert decision making. After all, no one disputes that the facade of democracy is a valuable one, even if behind the masonry is the large steel and concrete frame that is British bureaucracy.
These experts have all ended up with their own taxpayer funded offices, salaries, acronyms and dot gov website domains. More importantly, they have ended up with formal statutory powers, frequently entirely exempt from ministerial oversight. I’m talking of course about quangos, or quasi-non-governmental organisations.
That’s why we are launching a new project, Britain’s Quangos Uncovered, a full scale exposé of the quangocracy that will go beyond spin and into the nitty gritty of these organisations: who they are, what they cost, why they exist and what should be done about them.
This has been an issue plaguing politics for decades now. It’s nothing new. Cameron, Blair and Thatcher all came to power pledging something like a bonfire of the quangos. The current government has their own version of this. But as the Public Administration Committee succinctly put in a report into shrinking the quango state some years back, previous efforts did not achieve reform “on the scale that was initially pledged.”
So there has long been a frustration about the amount of power devolved to quangos, from all sides of the political spectrum. Indeed, in 2010 the Guardian’s former political editor wrote that “periodic quango culls are not automatically a bad thing.”
But this time is different. A periodic “quango cull” will not suffice. Because while there are actually far fewer quangos than in previous iterations — hundreds were abolished under the coalition — the many that still remain pose three significant problems which if not novel are certainly much greater than in eras past.
Firstly, there is the ideological takeover of these bodies by hyper-progressive politics. The leftward lean of the men and women who staff our institutions is not a new phenomenon. But twenty years ago their corridors were not dominated by ideas of intersectionality, critical race theory, queerness, reparations, the complete overthrow of capitalism and so on. Now these bodies, out of ministerial control, have fallen firmly under the influence of the EDI industry, and bodies such as Stonewall. It’s surely no coincidence that one of the wokest, the College of Policing, was responsible for the issuing of guidance on “non-crime hate incidents” which has led to a wave of flagrantly inappropriate police action, including against national columnists with a profile.
Second is the ballooning cost of government. High-levels of unskilled migration and the aging society has delivered us a state which does lots of things, incredibly poorly. While the mid-1970s saw spending at a similar level to now, some key services made up much less of this budget. Health cost us 4.2 per cent of GDP, social security 8 per cent. That now stands at 8.5 and 10.2 per cent. Debt interest was just 2.4 per cent of GDP, compared to 4.5 per cent now. Put bluntly, there was a lot more money available for the bells and whistles of government — stuff that may sound nice in a press release, but takes away resources from vital frontline services. No longer. Strain on the health and welfare budgets will only grow. Defence spending needs to go up (it was 4.3 per cent of GDP in the mid-1970s). And some basic functions of government are in a state of complete collapse. Just look at driving tests, which are administered by the DVSA. This should be a simple service for the state to deliver, yet average wait times are at 20 weeks. Yet at the same time UK quangos continue to fund projects like research into the history of gay porn.
Thirdly, the power and influence they hold. Sure, quangos have always made lives difficult for ministers. But rarely have they so resolutely stood in the way of democratic decision-making, whether through immigration policy, housing policy, fiscal policy and so on. Some of this is the consequence of terrible legislation, in other cases it’s been driven by quangos being granted an inch and taking a mile. Take for example Natural England’s relentless efforts to block any housing absolutely anywhere near anyone or anything. Sometimes it’s not the deliberate actions of the quango itself which causes the issues, but the presentation of it by politicians, commentators and others as the Delphic Oracle of its sphere of policymaking. Hence the Office for Budget Responsibility has been one of the dominant forces in fiscal policymaking in recent years.
It’s not enough to just look at how the state does something, we should be asking whether it should be doing it at all
So it has to be more than just a shuffling of the deck of cards that is the British state, its functions, responsibilities and its people. A serious assessment needs to be made. There are quangos that are genuinely necessary in their current form, i.e. they are delivering a service government should be providing but which should not have ministerial oversight. These may need reform but not much else. There are quangos which are delivering a necessary service but one that should be under ministerial control, or perhaps even delivered by the private sector along with appropriate regulation. They should be absorbed into core government departments, or privatised. There will be quangos that should be merged to avoid duplication. There will be quangos which shouldn’t exist at all.
But critically, across all of these categories, a serious assessment needs to be made of their functions. It’s not enough to just look at how the state does something, we should be asking whether it should be doing it at all.
