Quango list shows 192 to be axed

[skinz]

Quango list shows 192 to be axed

BBC News - Quango list shows 192 to be axed

The list says more than 300 quangos will be retained The government has announced that 192 quangos are to be scrapped.

Some will be abolished altogether others will see their functions carried out by government or other bodies, the Cabinet Office says.

A further 118 will be merged. Some are still under consideration but 380 will be retained, according to the list.

Minister Francis Maude said they did not know how many jobs would go. Labour's Liam Byrne said the cull could end up costing more than it saved.

Q&A: What is a quango?
Quangos - "quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations" - are arm's-length bodies funded by Whitehall departments but not run by them.

The Tories and Lib Dems agreed to cut the number and cost of the bodies in their coalition agreement and had reviewed 901 bodies - 679 quangos and 222 other statutory bodies.

Many of the better known organisations due to be abolished had already been announced by the government. These include the UK Film Council, the Audit Commission, the Health Protection Agency, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and eight regional development agencies.

Among those the list confirms will be retained are Acas, the Competition Appeals Tribunal, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Low Pay Commission, UK Trade International, the Charity Commission for England and Wales and the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

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The Tories now need to tell us whether their desperation for headlines and faster cuts means the cost of closing quangos is actually bigger than the savings”
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Liam Byrne


The list also confirms that the government intends to merge the Competition Commission with the Office of Fair Trading, Postcom and Ofcom will be merged as will the Gambling Commission and National Lottery Commission.

Asked about potential job losses, Cabinet Office Minister Mr Maude said: "We don't know at this stage ... All the staff in bodies that are affected are being communicated with today and the bodies and the departments which are responsible for them will be working out the detail over the months ahead."

He said it was right to get the "broad" plans out - but it was still a "work in progress" as some bodies were still under review. In future every three years each remaining quango would be subject to a review, to see if it is still needed.

He said he could not say how much money would be saved, but it would be "significant". The government argues that the plans are not primarily about saving money - but about increasing accountability, by having decisions taken by ministers where possible.

'Desperation for headlines'

Supporters say they have expertise and can operate without ministerial interference. Opponents argue that they decrease ministers' accountability and add costs.

Unions say many of the coalition's planned changes will damage public services, cost jobs and not result in government savings, as the expense involved in abolishing quangos will be large.

And shadow Cabinet Office minister Liam Byrne said: "Labour had a plan for steadily saving £0.5bn by carefully closing 25% of quangos over the next few years.

"The Tories now need to tell us whether their desperation for headlines and faster cuts means the cost of closing quangos is actually bigger than the savings. And while they're at it, they should tell us whether their manifesto commitment for 20 new quangos is now on ice."

Mr Maude said to survive, quangos had to pass the tests including whether they carry out a role for which they needed to be politically impartial.

He told the BBC there was no "dogmatic" ban on any new quangos being set up, but he said too many had been set up at arm's length so minister's could "avoid taking decisions" or face difficult questions and he suggested there was much duplication of work by different bodies.

Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman said the aim was to "deal with the proliferation and mess of having lots and lots of departmental bodies, some of which will have been set up with one objective in mind but the world's moved on".

'Cowardice'

A Public Bodies Bill is to be introduced to give government departments the power to cut or change the functions of bodies set up under statute.

The legislation will also mean that the power is in place to abolish quangos in future.

But Conservative MP Douglas Carswell told the BBC that "cowardice" of politicians of all parties had contributed to the growth and that Parliament, rather than the government, should be in charge of monitoring the situation.

Ian Magee, a senior fellow at the Institute of Government who authored a report on quangos in July, told the BBC there appeared to be a "change in rhetoric" in recent weeks from the government - who were now talking more about restoring accountability rather than saving substantial sums.

He said simply transferring functions from quangos to government departments would not save much money.

"For example, of the 700-plus bodies that there are, something like 15 of them spend 80% of the money. And indeed, 75% of the money is in grants, university grants or legal aid that is passed on to others.

"So unless you get rid of those functions altogether, you're not going to save a great deal of money. That doesn't mean there isn't scope for efficiency."

And Mike O'Connor - head of Consumer Focus, which will see its functions transferred to the Citizens Advice Bureau, said his body cost £5m a year - but added: "Our victories for consumers far outweigh that. Just last week we got NPower to repay £70m to consumers as a result of using our legal powers to investigate what's going on in the market and speaking up for consumers".

First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, said: "We are disappointed with some of the changes the UK government has announced today and are concerned at the way in which the review has been rushed through with limited opportunity to work through all the practical implications from the Welsh perspective."

 

[TheCheekyMonkey]

cash cows for the politicians.

 

[oneman]

They all seemed to be jobs for the boys (many seemed to be have MP wives on the board) while being ineffective. I remember a lot of them being arts and charity related ?

 

[lusephur]

George Monbiot got it correct with this.

We've been staring at the wrong list. In an effort to guess what will hit us tomorrow, we've been trying to understand the first phase of the British government's assault on the public sector: its bonfire of the quangos. Almost all the public bodies charged with protecting the environment, animal welfare and consumers have been either hobbled or killed. But that's only half the story. Look again, and this time make a list of the quangos which survived.

If the government's aim had been to destroy useless or damaging public bodies, it would have started with the Commonwealth Development Corporation. It was set up to relieve poverty in developing countries, but when New Labour tried, and failed, to privatise it, the CDC completely changed its mission. Now it pours money into lucrative corporate ventures, while massively enriching its own directors. Private Eye discovered that in 2007 this quango paid its chief executive just over a million pounds. The magazine has also shown how the CDC has become entangled in a series of corruption cases. Uncut. Unreformed.

The same goes for the Export Credit Guarantee Department. The ECGD effectively subsidises private corporations, by underwriting the investments they make abroad. At one point, 42% of its budget was spent on propping up BAE's weapons sales. It also pours money into drilling for oil in fragile environments. A recent court case showed how it has underwritten contracts obtained with the help of bribery. Uncut. Unreformed.

The Sea Fish Industry Authority exists "to help improve profitability for the seafood industry". Although it is a public body, all but one of its 11 directors work for either the fishing industry or food companies. They seek to "promote the consumption of seafood", to "champion the industry in public debates" and to "influence the regulatory process" in the industry's favour. Uncut. Unreformed.

Can you see the pattern yet? Public bodies whose purpose is to hold corporations to account are being swept away. Public bodies whose purpose is to help boost corporate profits, regardless of the consequences for people and the environment, have sailed through unharmed. What the two lists suggest is that the economic crisis is the disaster the Conservatives have been praying for. The government's programme of cuts looks like a classic example of disaster capitalism: using a crisis to re-shape the economy in the interests of business.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how disaster capitalism was conceived by the extreme neoliberals at the University of Chicago. These people believed that the public sphere should be eliminated, that business should be free to do as it wants, and almost all tax and social spending should be stopped. They believed that total personal freedom in a completely free market produces a perfect economy and perfect relationships. It was a utopian system as fanatical as any developed by a religious cult. And it was profoundly unpopular. For a long time its only supporters were the heads of multinational corporations and a few wackos in the US government.

In a democracy under normal conditions, those who were harmed by abandoning public provision would outvote those who gained from it. So the Chicago programme couldn't be imposed in these circumstances. As the Chicago School's guru, Milton Friedman, explained, "only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change". After a crisis has struck, he added later, "a new administration has some six to nine months in which to achieve major changes; if it does not act decisively during that period, it will not have another such opportunity."

The first such opportunity was provided by General Pinochet's coup in Chile. The coup was plotted by two factions: the generals and a group of economists trained at the University of Chicago and funded by the CIA. Their ideas had already been comprehensively rejected by the electorate, but now the electorate was irrelevant: Pinochet used the crisis he had created to imprison, torture or kill anyone who dissented. The Chicago School policies – privatisation, deregulation, massive tax and spending cuts – were catastrophic. Inflation rose to 375% in 1974; the highest rate on earth. Even so, Friedman insisted that the programme was not going far or fast enough. On a visit to Chile in 1975 he persuaded Pinochet to hit much harder. The result was a massive increase in unemployment and the near-eradication of the middle class. But the very rich became much richer, and the corporations, scarcely taxed, deregulated and fattened on privatised assets, became much more powerful.

By 1982, Friedman's prescriptions had caused a spectacular economic crash. Unemployment hit 30%; debt exploded. Pinochet sacked the Chicago economists and started re-nationalising stricken companies, whereupon the economy began to recover. Chile's so-called economic miracle began only after Friedman's doctrines were abandoned. The Chicago School's catastrophic programme pushed almost half the population below the poverty line and left Chile with one of the world's highest rates of inequality.

But all this was spun by the corporate media as a great success. With the help of successive US governments, similar programmes were imposed on dozens of countries in which crises ensured that the population was unable to resist. Other Latin American dictators copied Pinochet's economic policies, with the help of mass disappearances, torture and killings. The poor world's debt crisis was used by the IMF and the World Bank to impose Chicago School programmes on countries that had no option but to accept their help. The US hit Iraq with economic shock and awe – privatisation, a flat tax, massive deregulation – even as the bombs were still falling. After Hurricane Katrina wrecked New Orleans, Friedman described it as "an opportunity to radically reform the educational system". His disciples immediately moved in, sweeping away public schools while the residents were picking up the pieces of their lives, replacing them with private charter schools.

Our crisis is less extreme, so, in the UK, the shock doctrine cannot be so widely applied. But, as David Blanchflower warned yesterday, there's a strong possibility that the cuts programme will precipitate a bigger crisis: "it's a terrible, terrible mistake. The sensible thing to do is to spread [the cuts] over a long time." That's another feature of disaster capitalism: it exacerbates the crises on which it thrives, creating its own opportunities.

So we shouldn't wonder that 35 corporate executives wrote to the Telegraph yesterday, arguing, just as Milton Friedman used to do, for a short, sharp shock, before the window of opportunity closes. The policy might hit their profits for a while, but when we stagger out of our shelters to assess the damage, we'll discover that we have emerged into a different world, run for their benefit, not ours.