The Commons Public Administration Select Committee has stuck it to the government and won headlines as a result. The MPs use uncompromisingly scathing language to attack the amateurism of the Cabinet Office in its bid to cull quangos.
Professor Colin Talbot – a regular in this parish – advised the committee and he is right that their criticism is extraordinary, especially given the previous form of its chair, Bernard Jenkin, as a Tory loyalist.
It’s true the report names few names. It doesn’t for example identify Caroline Spelman’s crass naivety in proposing to get rid of the Food Standards Authority – or the Environment Agency for that matter.
An odd omission from the report is the Audit Commission. Here was a glaring example of what it bemoans as the absence of consultation, or ‘proper procedure’. Eric Pickles dumped the Commission on a whim, and applied none of the tests of cost effectiveness the MPs specify.
Yet, between the lines, the Jenkin committee is actually saying something more profound than that the Cameron government has been behaving with a heady mix of recklessness, dogmatism and naivety. The fact is that the Tories inherited a quango state of stupefying complexity.
On the Today programme today Sir Ian Magee, one of the authors of a coolly reasoned Institute of Government report on quangos, gabbled confusingly through the multiple categories of these bodies – not his fault altogether because the constitutional landscape is densely wooded and the corporate undergrowth even thicker.
The jungly nature of arm’s length government does not excuse the way the Tories claimed they would save a billion pounds from their cull and have failed to deliver. But it does indict their predecessors for allowing such a rank proliferation of public bodies.
I would be the first to acknowledge how the Audit Commission had lost its sense of purpose and direction and, with Comprehensive Area Assessment, had over-reached. But that makes a case for forensic examination of its strengths and weaknesses, with appropriate remedial action, not a case for summary execution.
What the PASC report does is underline the consistent findings of Sir Gus O’Donnell’s Capability Reviews and sundry other reports: government departments themselves are at fault in failing to manage the burgeoning quango state.
The Cabinet Office is most to blame. It never produced a comprehensive list of arm’s length bodies; it had no data base on their membership or cost. Individual departments set them up and closed them down at will, leading to inconsistencies in payment, governance and effectiveness.
The quango state, in other words, has long needed cleaning up. What it did not need was an ideological onslaught by incoming Tory ministers (the Liberal Democrats are irrelevant for these purposes) who did not understand enough about how government worked to be effective.
Eric Pickles is a good example here. Having rolled in applause from the Tory faithful for announcing the abolition of Audit Commission last summer, he has conspicuously failed to deliver. Communities and Local Government civil servants are at sea. They know little or nothing about audit. Glib assumptions about what the National Audit Office (is it a quango – we don’t even have adequate nomenclature) might or might not do have proved unfounded. The draft abolition legislation has gone Awol.
As for cost savings – forget it. That, indeed, is the PASC report’s most damning indictment. For all the government’s trumpeting of the need to cut spending, its quango cull of last summer failed to produce any identifiable savings. Pressed on money by interviewers the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude could only waffle.
David Walker is a public policy and management commentator, and formerly director of communications for the Audit Commission
