The bodies, regularly created and axed by politicians, can help ministers demonstrate priorities and avoid blame
Keir Starmer will this week set out plans to cut some quangos to reduce red tape and a bloated state, helping with economic growth. Politicians have embarked on similar programmes before. This is what quangos are and what they do:
A quango is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation, although the government calls them “arm’s length bodies” or ALBs. They oversee regulations for the government and operate independently from politicians.
Everything from the running of the NHS to issuing driving licences, maintaining railways and monitoring food standards is carried out by ALBs. They can be executive agencies such as the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency (DVLA) and the Met Office, non-departmental public bodies such as the British Council and the Environment Agency, or non-ministerial departments such as HM Revenue and Customs and the Food Standards Agency.
New governments like to invent quangos to bring new effort to their priorities, such as Rachel Reeves’s Office for Value for Money. They also create distance from politicians, meaning that if something goes wrong they can blame the relevant quango, rather than their own department.
Despite allowing quangos to multiply, politicians also regularly try to cut down the number of ALBs and bring more responsibility into departments. Quangos are often created to remove political accountability but ministers can then end up feeling powerless and wanting to bring powers back under their own control.
There are more than 300 ALBs, although there is some controversy over the definition and many think there are more. Large ALBs include NHS England, HMRC and Network Rail. They collectively employ more than 390,000 staff and account for about £350bn of spending.
David Cameron was on a mission to rip up the “quangocracy” after he was elected in 2010, getting rid of about 285 out of about 1,000. However, an audit later found it did not save as much as the £2.6bn planned, with transition costs doubling to about £830m. About 184 new organisations were created at the same time. One of the biggest ones established by the coalition was the Office for Budget Responsibility which provides independent economic analysis and forecasts.
The former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg attempted another bonfire of quangos in 2022. He said the number of ALBs identified in the Cabinet Office fell from 463 to 295 between 2016 and 2019.
After the last cull of quangos, about 16% were absorbed by central government, 17% taken over by other committees, 4% by charities, 2% by local government and 2% by the private sector.
