One Hundred and Thirty four UNELECTED BODIES control our lives and no wonder Dave Cameron and his increasingly merry band wants to cull them (I'd even do the job for FREE! Well perhaps not quite for free but you get the idea!) but at the end of the day if he's looking to save money, he won't be returning that much to the Treasury. Simply someone somewhere will have to take over the duties of the disbanded Quango.
The trouble is that as they are run as non-profit organisations there is no urgency or concept of value for money - taxpayers money, not government money, which is after all taxpayers money..
Consider that disgraced MP Elliott Morley, currently being courted by Inspector Knacker, was the Environment head honcho and consider how the Environment Agency spends our money..all very good at telling us we are being flooded, and they have loads of boffins on tap, to tell us why, but amazingly slow and seemingly totally disinterested in putting physical projects into place.
In some cases senior EA staff are dangerously close to the Water Companies and polluters they are supposed to be legally keeping an eye on. By the way the Environment Agency actually OWNS A PUB! Bet Dave Cameron didn't know that!
I spent some time on a contract within the Environment Agency lauching the flood campaign back in the year 2000. Despite having an internal England wide army of promotion, exhibition and PR people they paid hundreds of thousands of taxpayers pounds to an external agency called appropriately enough Circus to carry out the publicity and PR campaign.
Imagine my amazement when a few weeks later boxes of brightly printed blank press release paper and a list of local newspaper Advertising Departments and a request that we research, create, write, produce and print the news releases for them...
Clearly money is being wasted hand over fist, but the people within the quangoes are experts at hubris. It needs another unelected external body to dig into the other unelected external bodies ....you can see where this is going!
My remedy? Lop or top slice 25% per annum off all budgets, personnel, senior boards for the next three years ending up with a baseline budget of 25% and get each quango to bid for extra funding by providing clearly set out targets and equally clearly defined goals. Some will fall be the wayside and frankly if they do then we don't need them.
On Twitter as @julianbray: Join the conversation...
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