24 September 2010updated 05 Oct 2023 8:50am

Axing quangos is really about political capital

As the spending review approaches, a leaked list of doomed quangos suggests that these cuts are about political gains more than financial savings.

By Caroline Crampton

A list leaked to the Telegraph reveals the 177 quangos that are allegedly to be the first on to David Cameron’s “bonfire of the quangos”.

The full list includes a dazzling array of bodies, with examples as varied and esoteric as the Agricultural Dwelling House Committees (comprising 16 bodies), the Public Guardian Board and the Teachers TV Board.

It’s easy to react with bemused horror to the array of obscure-sounding titles. But the list does demand slightly closer scrutiny — also marked for burning are the Audit Commission, British Waterways, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, and the Women’s National Commission, to name just a few. Baroness Deech has already gone on the offensive this morning’s Today programme to point out that much of the £5m budget for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority comes from patients, not taxpayers, and that axing it thus achieves very little in budgetary terms.

As we get closer to October’s Comprehensive Spending Review, the debate surrounding the future of these bodies and others is obviously going to intensify. Other high-profile examples, such as the BBC World Service, the British Council, the Office of Fair Trading and the Carbon Trust, are still under review.

But while these bodies await their fate, I thought I’d share a small insight into one of the bodies that is reportedly going to be axed: the Government Hospitality Advisory Committee for the Purchase of Wine. A while ago, consumed with curiosity as to what this committee was actually up to and how much of taxpayers’ money it was spending on wine, I put in a Freedom of Information request, and discovered the following:

The government calculates that it will use around £90,00-£100,000 worth of stock (wines, spirits, beers, etc) a year for “high-level events”.
Government Hospitality, the department within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that administers the committee, spends roughly one-eighth of its £800,000 annual budget on restocking the wine cellar.
The committee has five members, who meet four times a year and are not paid for their time (apart from travel expenses). It is chaired by Sir David Wright, the former British ambassador to Japan.
According to minutes, tastings take place during meetings. Recommendations are then made about purchases.

None of this is of anything other than passing interest. But it does provide a small amount of background to one of the entries on the baffling list of soon-to-be-extinct quangos. It also raises a bigger point about the motivation behind the coalition’s war on quangos.

Wines will still need to be purchased, so it is unlikely that major savings will be made there, and the existence of the committee itself costs almost nothing, so “burning” this quango achieves very little in the way of saving costs. Without having investigated them all, I still would wager that a significant portion of the rest of the list falls into the same category — fulfilling functions that will go on being necessary, at relatively small cost.

A senior Whitehall source told the Telegraph that “these reforms represent the most significant rolling back of bureaucracy and the state for decades. Our starting point has been that every quango must not only justify its existence but its reliance on public money.”

This connection between abolishing quangos and “rolling back bureaucracy” is the real story here. Getting rid of these quangos isn’t going to eliminate the Budget deficit, but it will give the coalition political ammunition once more against the “bloated bureaucracy” instituted by Labour, and put the government on the offensive as public support for the spending cuts wanes and the spending review itself approaches.