Beware the slop right's "bonfire of quangos"

One of the favourite tropes of the slop right is the “bonfire of quangos”. Going off the headline figure (Cabinet Office Data), we spend £339.8bn on Arm’s Length Bodies. But very few of them fit the classic perception of a quango, most of them serve a function, and the top ten soak up 90% of the funding.

Of the top 252 Arm’s length Bodies, 59 have a budget of zero, some even turn a profit like the Hydrographic Office, some are industry funded, and then you have oddballs such as the Student Loans Company and National Savings & Investments.

Meanwhile the mid-ranking ones include the Submarine Delivery Agency, HM Land Registry, Serious Fraud Office, Valuations Office Agency, the British Library, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. It’s hard to identify any which are completely useless. Meanwhile, many ALB’s are shell organisations with no overheads at all.

The problem, insofar as there is one, is the overhead costs for business caused by self-financing regulatory authorities, but even then you’d be hard pressed to say they shouldn’t exist. If you remove the top ten ALBs, the scourge of “quangos” doesn’t really add up to all that much. As with Reform’s DOGE, slopulists will find there isn’t all that much fuel for their bonfire.

What they can do, of course, is look to amalgamate a few, but in doing so you immediately lose the transparency that allows us to do this kind of analysis in the first place. The quango ecosystems allows us to see what government do at a glance, and what it costs, and because they’re self-contained operations, you get properly siloed data for things like FOIs. As such, a “bonfire of quangos” would be backward step for transparency.

As ever, if you want to make savings, you actually have to climb in on a more detailed level and have a look around, and to do so, you have to know what you’re looking at, and understand its function. The problem with the slop right is that if they don’t immediately see the utility of an arm of government then in their eyes it serves no value at all. Everything they think is based on lazy assumptions, and not even a nanosecond’s thought goes into the possible externalities of carelessly deleting government organisations - many of which are the tier of invisible government that distinguishes us from a third world country.

One thing I found especially interesting is the “woke waste” theme on X a while back. The UKRI database is always good for a laugh if you want to pull out some of the howler research projects in academia, but usually the headline grant sum is actually pretty small in real terms. It often doesn’t even buy the time of one full time researcher, bearing in mind that universities take a cut for estate and indirect costs.

These crank research grants are also less than 1% of the UK research budget and many of them are sociology projects funded by trusts and foundations. A lot of this “woke waste” shtick is slop journalism of the TPA variety. It’s cherry-picking to generate lurid Daily Mail stories to boost the profile of the TPA.

The TPA is especially bad for this, running stories on quango credit card spending, which sounds a lot to the average Joe, but in terms of organisational expenditure it’s small beans. That is not to say there aren’t examples of waste and a cavalier attitude to spending, it doesn’t make the case for a purge of government functions.

Returning to the point, though that 90% of spending goes on the top ten organisations, one of them is NHS England, which is not a quango by any realistic definition. I also found that some of the bigger budgets account for pension liabilities. There is an argument for making Network Rail an independent state owned company rather than an ALB but it’s still going to cost the government money. Then you have HMRC included in the list with a spend of £40bn, but one assumes this is doled out in the form of tax credits.

As such, there isn’t an honest case of a bonfire of quangos. All they’re really talking about is shuffling things around again. If they’re talking about just the bodies that would qualify as a quango by a normal person’s definition then we’re not actually talking about a lot of money (to the extent that you could make a dent in the national debt or substantially cut taxes). Around a hundred of the 252 listed have budgets of under £2m.

Maybe you privatise one or two and cleave off the national museums, but it wouldn’t be worth spending the political capital for such marginal savings. The bottom line is that a first world government is necessarily expensive, and waste is a fact of life.

As such, a “bonfire of quangos” is little more than a rhetorical device, and a pretty meaningless one at that. For sure there is a debate to be had about Whitehall headcount, which has bloated in recent years, but again, if you want to cut the excess, you have to climb in and look at each department individually (MoD especially), but before you swing the axe you need to know up front what you actually want government to do. I can think of a number of areas where it will require more manpower to get on top of things, especially illegal immigration.

This, though is precisely why you shouldn’t throw around lazy tropes like a “bonfire of quangos”, because if you win power, you have to make good on your promise (which, as Reform’s DOGE discovered, is harder than it looks). Parties get thrown out of office when they raise expectations and can’t deliver. But that’s slopulists all over. They make big promises, assuming everything would be so much more efficient if only they were in charge, making that assumption on the basis of no actual knowledge of how anything works.

Again this is not to say that it’s impossible to make government more efficient. Certainly a purge of statutory obligations would help, alongside real devolution to the local level, reversing local authority amalgamations. This may lead to more accountable and responsive government, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will be cheaper.

Ultimately, the slopulists pushing this agenda are people like Rupert Lowe, who is a Thatcherite at heart, who would take pleasure in slashing arms of the state in the name of efficiency. But this how we ended up closing down local police stations, local magistrates courts, and slashing the headcount of Trading Standards and Environmental Health, which is why we have an explosion of organised crime and undetected illegal immigration. That’s one of the reasons why these people should never be allowed near power ever again.