Keir Starmer's war on quangos is doomed to fail unless he is bolder

Yahoo

08-04-2025

A few years ago I was taken on a tour of the innards of the Palace of Westminster, a place where I had worked for almost 20 years but had never seen its dark underside. In the bowels of Charles Barry's neo-Gothic masterpiece is a bewildering nexus of pipes, wires, cables and conduits which coil their way for miles beneath, above and around the 28-acre site.
Over the years the Palace has developed organically, with bits bolted on as and when they have been required: gas pipes, electricity wires, phone lines, TV cables, Wi-Fi and the rest. Many disappear into a wall and emerge no one knows where. Each year the bill for essential maintenance runs into many millions of pounds, but it is all patching-up and bodging. The dangers are evident, especially in a building that replaced one that burned to the ground in 1834, but MPs have been unable to agree on what to do about repairing it.
As a metaphor for the way we are governed it could hardly be bettered. The machinery of Whitehall makes a Heath-Robinson device look positively straightforward. Starry-eyed ministers, buoyed by an election victory, arrive in their departments eager to shine and implement their pet projects only to find that when they pull a lever there is nothing on the other end. The power they thought they possessed had been proxied out to an arm's length, non-departmental body, colloquially known as a quango.
Back in the day their number could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The BBC was one of the first and biggest. But in the 1970s and 1980s they grew like Topsy, hundreds of them often replicating decision-making being undertaken elsewhere.
Political hostility to quangos goes back decades. In 1995 the then shadow chancellor Gordon Brown said: 'The biggest question… is why our constitution is over-centralised, over-secretive and over-bureaucratic and why there is not more openness and accountability. The real alternative is a bonfire of the quangos and greater democracy.'
Labour's 1997 election manifesto attacked the Conservatives for supporting 'unaccountable quangos'. Tony Blair even promised to dump them in the 'dustbin of history'. But by the time Labour left office in 2010 there were still hundreds of them. Perversely, given Brown's strictures, they included one of the most powerful – the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England which assumed control over interest rates from the Chancellor.
The Coalition decided that a 'bonfire of the quangos' was needed and earmarked around 300 advisory bodies, consumer watchdogs and public service organisations for the torch. Out went the Audit Commission, the Animal Welfare Advisory Committee and Cycling England. Others, like the Zoos Forum, the Herbal Medicines Advisory Committee and the Air Quality Expert Group, were replaced by 'committees of experts'. Dozens were merged.
Did it make any difference? Are we better or more cheaply governed? Apparently not because Sir Keir Starmer now wants another conflagration as part of his somewhat nebulous plan to 'rewire the state'. Pat McFadden, who runs the Cabinet Office responsible for Whitehall, has asked every department to justify the existence of quangos within their bailiwick. Those that cannot be sufficiently justified will be closed, merged or have powers brought back into the department.
As a signal of intent, McFadden is drafting legislation that could shut down a swathe of quangos using a single Act of Parliament rather than requiring individual laws to abolish each one. The Government got off to a good start by closing down the mother and father of them all, NHS England. But the big, so far unanswered, question is what is to replace its functions and will it be an improvement or just as wasteful and unresponsive?
Look at what happened when Public Health England was abolished during the pandemic. It was replaced by a new body, the UK Health Security Agency, which has seamlessly adopted the 'nanny state' mantle of its predecessor. We can expect this to expand further, like the nation's waistlines, as Wes Streeting unveils his NHS reforms centred mostly on prevention.
But even as McFadden calls on departments to identify quangos for the chop, the Government is creating more of them, around 20 since July. They include Great British Energy, a Government-owned retail company that seeks to invest in, manage and operate clean energy projects alongside private sector firms.
Then there is the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council and National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority. Great British Railways will soon be up and running alongside a Passenger Standards Authority. Then we have Skills England, a Regulatory Innovation Office, a Fair Work Agency, a Border Security Command, a National Centre for Policing and an Independent Football Regulator. There are others, and even more are in the pipeline.
When Sir Keir talks about 'rewiring the state' it is not because he wants it to be smaller or cheaper to run. It is to make it responsive to his desire for 'active government', an old Wilsonian Labour belief in the paternalistic nature of the state. We are not going to be governed less – quite the opposite – just in a different way.
But even then Sir Keir will still have his hands tied. The quangos that have the most power are those that effectively determine core economic policies – the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Monetary Policy Committee and the Climate Change Committee. In one of its first acts Labour gave the OBR more powers, not fewer, putting the Chancellor in a budgetary straitjacket from which she cannot escape.
If Sir Keir really wants to reform Whitehall and save money then he could do worse than scrap a few departments in their entirety. What is the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for if there is an array of quangos doing the same job? Why do we need a Department for Culture, Media and Sport which works with 42 agencies and public bodies?
Sir Keir may be determined to 'rewire government' but without a clearer, bolder idea of how to do it he will end up in just as big a tangle as still exists under the Palace of Westminster.
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