Good riddance. However, I doubt it, QUANGOs have always existed, the Magna Charter and 39 Articles establish their fair share... However, few will mourn the passing of the bodies mentioned in the BBC's "leak list", the fact that the abolition of a great many of the bodies mentioned in the list such as 'The Hearing Aid Council', Rural Development Commission, and the utterly redundant 'Shipbuilders Corporation of Great Britain' which is merely a statutory legacy anyway, had already been announced and reported on the front page of The Independent, not to mention elsewhere in the media has apparently gone unremarked. In short this is to a certain extent the media having a day off before the Labour Party Conference opens and one of the Millipee bros (probably Ed since David's grovelling ATM) is crowned Prince-Bishop of the troubled realm that is the Holy Authoritarian Labour Movement.
All in all I must admit that I can't see a single body on the list that I am sad to see go. Free theatre for 16-25s rankles far more than the news that the Tribunal Service is about to get a lot bigger as various tiny non-entities spawned over the years are folded into where they should always have been to start with. I am happy to see that bodies like the Thames Gateway Development Corporation are being abolished and their functions devolved along with the much hated (except by nuclear power firms and the likes of Argent) Infrastructure Planning Commission. Looking at the list one wonders more than anything else why governments over the last 40, and increasingly over the last 25, have created so many bodies. Why does there need to be a Sport England and a Sport UK? Why not just have one body, with devolved sections, doing all of the sports funding and promotion? Likewise just look at the bowl of alphabet soup that is the list of Department of Health or DBSI QUANGOs. Why did no one try and keep track of the proliferation of QAUNGOs? Surely it makes sense for there to be one big regulator which monitors and enforces all of the different regulations in the media, utility, transport, health and safety and "safeguarding" sectors? As opposed to having Ofcom, Ofwat, Ofgen, DVLA, Office of the Rail Regulator, Health and Safety Executive, Food Standards Agency, CRB folk and the Vetting and Barring Authority, to name some of the bigger agencies all working in their own little sectors, with their own backroom bureaucracies, IT contracts, executive boards, sub-contracts, offices and officers, not talking to anyone else, when in actual fact they are all trying to do the same thing: protect the interests of the public, especially those most vulnerable within our society.
In short much of bodies scheduled for abolition or merger are not crucial, whatever we hear, rather they in the main bodies who have run their course (such as the Regional Industrial Development Boards, redundant since the early 1990s), those which should be merged not just for efficiency but to improve the service they deliver (National Lottery Commission and the Gambling Commission), those bodies which should be abolished because they are unnecessary and undermine democracy (Development Corporations whose powers would be better used by councils) and those (such as BECTA, the Film Council and the Rural Development Commission) which were just a bad idea in the first place, not to mention those bodies established in areas where the government really shouldn't be getting involved (Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property). Liberals everywhere can rejoice at the disappearance of these bodies.
*Interesting to note that the document implies that the government has identified 742 QUANGOs. The document appears to call for a 49% reduction, which is a good start.
*The document is available here (BBC link).
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