Reform of Quangos

General and Other Policy
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This is talked about constantly, but rarely ever acted on. We need some clear and fundamental principles of how quangos are to be dealt with. (These are agencies that effectively have state power, but without being part of the elected government. So for example the Bank of England has the power to set interest rates, but it is not run by elected politicians, and was specficially given this power to get it away from democratic control.) Quangos are basically an expression of the idea that it is actually GOOD to get things away from democratic control and leave them to be run by “the experts”, an idea which was kicked into high gear by the election of Tony Blair in 1997.

The dumb approach people take is “abolish all quangos”, but that isn’t really tenable, if you look at the list of quangos - " Agencies and other public bodies" Departments, agencies and public bodies - GOV.UK , some of them are centuries old and clearly needed to exist long before the recent anti democratic explosion of them (for example the Royal Mint is technically a quango), while many of them could indeed be abolished.

For those that are kept, what we should have is principles controlling them, like for example it should be possible for the government to override them automatically when they do anything it doesn’t like (see the recent Sentencing Council issue where they literally just told the Justice Minister they didn’t care what she said and were going to ignore her).

The basic principle is that they should be subordinate to democratic control, not set up as a way to ignore it. Every quango should be subordinate to a Ministerial department, and the responsible minister should be able to overrule any decision they make.

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For me, the principle is clear. I think that there are two types of civil servant, the administrative, and the policy-making.

What I mean by this is that the people at DVLA who do all the forms for handing out driving licences, or the people in HMRC who calculate how much tax someone owes are generally administrative positions. An admin can become a policy maker by refusing to do their job (see the home office and their rubber stamp for illegals) but shouldn’t, and if they do, it should be a firable offence.

To my mind, the civil servants who are policymakers should be political appointees, appointed via a return to the spoils system. These people should lose their jobs when the government changes automatically. Then, all quangos whose job is entirely policy-making (such as the sentencing council) should be abolished and have their functions returned to the Privy Council.

Interest rates, for example, should be germane to the chancellor who should set them as a matter of course. He may be advised by the BoE, but the BoE should not say what it thinks publically or decide what to do for itself.

There are interesting examples, such as the charity commission which seems like a non-dispassionate regulator, in that they seem to regulate what would be right-wing charities more harshly than left-wing ones (i.e. the questions around why Hope not Hate has a charity in the first place). This would be an interesting discussion because I’m not too sure what to do with the Charity Commission. I can see good arguments for its continued existence, but if it cannot be an unbiased regulator, then maybe it should be stripped back?

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