22.08.12
100 quangos culled in Whitehall efficiency programme
The Coalition has axed over 100 quangos, with a further 90 merged into other bodies, the Cabinet Office has announced. This means the department is largely on track to save £2.6bn by the end of Parliament.
However costs from the reorganisation, including redundancy payouts, could be as much as £900m, with the reliability of the savings questioned by critics.
In October 2010, the Coalition reviewed 901 quangos and earmarked nearly 200 for closure, with 120 to be amalgamated, as part of the deficit reduction strategy.
The closures and mergers already completed will save £1.4bn, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has stated.
Maude said: “We are only halfway through the first phase of our programme. Once we have completed the planned closures and mergers, we will continue to review all remaining quangos to ensure that never again will we end up with so many of these vast bureaucratic and unaccountable bodies.”
But the up-front cost of the process is projected to be between £600m and £900m.
Shadow Cabinet Office minister Jon Trickett said: “Far from cutting bureaucracy they've launched an unwanted and wasteful upheaval of the NHS, creating a new NHS Commissioning Board, which David Cameron has been warned ‘could turn into the greatest quango in the sky’.”
Institute of Directors programme director Tom Gash said: “If the figures do stand up to scrutiny and there has been no decrease in government performance in services, this is a good thing but the reliability of the savings claimed is questionable.”
The original list of quangos, which were to go and which to stay and why, is available here:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_191543.pdf
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