Douglas Carswell's Blog

Why we need to cull the quangos

Desperate to defend the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority from abolition, its former chairman Baroness Deech, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "This is one (quango) that deals with new life, new baby life and health and very important medical matters.

"It only costs £5 million and it is not taxpayers' money, most of the money comes from the patients” she pleaded.

Baroness.  Scrapping quangos is not just about money. Nor even democracy.  It is about ensuring we make better public policy.

Take the HFEA as an example. It has presided over a regulatory regime governing sperm donation that means otherwise responsible, caring adults are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid the licensed system.  Hence the large number of people prepared to use on-line, unregulated donation services.   

Quick to defend their public subsidy, the quangocrats are much slower to ask if it might perhaps be their regulations that have unintended consequences for many people desperate to have children. Public policy ought to be about doing everything possible to ensure that responsible adults wanting to become mums and dads, are able to.  Somehow with unaccountable quangocrats at the helm, it isn’t.

Take the Financial Service Authority as another example. It has spent a decade imposing stringent regulations on City institutions. So much so they’ve created entire compliance departments. Amidst all the box ticking, did those rules do anything to prevent banks building up reckless levels of credit?

The CSA, DVLA, EA, DSA ... there is an entire alphabet soup of quangos of whom much the same could be written.  Public policy is sclerotic in their hands.

Quangos should either be abolished – or made directly accountable, their bosses subject to confirmation hearings and having to appear annually before Commons select committee to plead for their budget. Do that and we won’t just save money.  We might get better public policy, too.

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