WHEN the autumn term starts this week the British Potato Council — annual budget: £6m — will be sending teams into schools to encourage children to sample crisps and eat chips. The BPC even has a dance troupe called the Chippie Dales.
To counter it, the Food Standards Agency — cost: £143m a year — will be campaigning to lower cholesterol and fight obesity which costs the country an estimated £7 billion a year. The organisations have conflicting agendas but both are quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations) paid for in part by the taxpayer.
When Tony Blair came to power he promised to sweep away the growth of “unaccountable quangos”. But if all non- departmental public bodies are included, he has created another 752. They include the BPC, the Zoos Forum and the Gaelic Development Agency.
An investigation by The Sunday Times has found that quangos spend £180 billion in total, equivalent to £3,600 a year for every adult in Britain. Of this, at least £83 billion is direct government funding.
The cash is not always well spent. The Assets Recovery Agency spends four times more than it recovers from criminals and would be insolvent if it were a private company.
Quangos can prove useful for the government and for those who sit on them.
It means that Whitehall can decant civil servants into such outside bodies and claim that it is cutting red tape. It can also use quangos for concealment: many do not have to provide answers under the Freedom of Information Act. For those who sit on the governing bodies they provide a lucrative source of income. Some quango heads earn more than £100,000 a year for just a few days’ work each month.
There is a merry-go-round of the same people. The unofficial title “queen of the quangos” has passed from Baroness Howe, wife of the former Conservative foreign secretary, to Nicky Gavron, the former Labour deputy mayor of London, to Baroness (Brenda) Dean, the former trade union leader, and back to Penelope, Viscountess Cobham, girlfriend of David Mellor, another former Tory minister. At one stage Gavron was a member of 16 government groups, from town planning to environmental bodies.
Nor is there much sense in the appointments. Janet Bainbridge, who chairs the research and development committee at the BPC, previously chaired the advisory committee on novel foods and processes, which helped to promote yoghurts and low cholesterol spreads.
The BPC, which has 56 employees and has devised almost as many ways to eat a potato, raises most of its money from a compulsory levy on potato growers and seed merchants but also receives £61,308 a year from the government.
It has to compete for attention in schools with the Milk Development Council (MDC), which has seen its staff increase from seven in 2000 to 49 last year, many of them “school milk facilitators” encouraging children to drink more milk.
The BPC has been voted Britain’s most useless quango by a website that monitors public spending. The runners-up include the MDC and the Home Grown Cereals Authority.
“The government only needs to get Mr Bun the Baker and they’d have a winning hand,” said Mike Denham, a former Treasury official who runs the Burning Our Money blog under the guise of Wat Tyler.
Bainbridge, who is paid £100 for every BPC meeting, said: “How can they say we are the most useless? You would have to know what every quango does to appreciate their value. I think our work is quite important. It is about learning the difference between a healthy chip and an unhealthy chip.”
The Cabinet Office said there were 910 quangos last year, employing more than 90,000 people and costing the taxpayer £32 billion a year. But William Norton, a tax lawyer, who has spent the past three months scouring the accounts of every government department, claims that the number of quangos is in fact 2,566, an increase of 41% since Labour came to power.
Under this definition, bodies such as the UK Film Council are quangos. It, too, has had problems with potatoes. It lost £1m investing in the film The Sex Lives of the Potato Men which drew execrable reviews. John Woodward, its chief executive, earns £198,000 a year.
Norton, who worked on the Conservative party’s James review into government spending that identified £35 billion of Whitehall waste before last year’s election, argues that any unelected organisation funded by a department to carry out the work of government should be regarded as a quango.
“It’s a case of where you put the goalposts. The consequence of the way the government publishes its lists is that they disguise the real number of quangos,” Norton said.
Another expert, Dan Lewis, director of the Efficiency in Government Unit, calculates that 111 quangos have been created under Labour.
Dr Eamonn Butler, director of the Adam Smith Institute which once estimated that there were 4,608 bodies to which ministers had powers of appointment, said: “Quangos are not as accountable as politicians are, and yet many have draconian powers over ordinary people.
“Some levy fees on ordinary people and business, while others say they are private companies and as such have avoided being scrutinised by the National Audit Office.”
David Burrowes, a Conservative member of the Commons public administration select committee, said: “The concern is that these quangos are linked to cronyism and other areas of unaccountability.”
THE BIG EARNERS IN QUANGO LAND
Britain’s highest-earning quango chiefs to end of financial year 2004-5
£279,081 Peter Lobban
CEO, Construction Industry Training Board
£198,143 John Woodward
CEO, UK Film Council
£187,200 Mark Haysom
CEO, Learning and Skills Council
£175,000 David Goldstone
CEO, Partnerships for Schools (PfS)
£162,564 Roger Draper
CEO, Sport England
£158,602 Tom Wright
CEO, VisitBritain
£153,513 Michael O’Connor
Director, Millennium Commission
£148,203 David Sherlock
CEO Adult Learning Inspectorate
£146,316 Stephen Dunmore
CEO, New Opportunities Fund
£144,106 Clare Dodgson
CEO, Legal Services Commission
Top five quangos by government investment to end of financial year 2004-5:
Learning and Skills Council £8.5 billion
Teacher Training Agency £514m
Engineering and Physical Research Council £425m
Medical Research Council £409m
North West Development Agency £338m
Source: Public Bodies 2005 report published by the Cabinet Office
