The cost of Britain’s “hidden state” of unelected public bodies has soared to more than £100 billion a year, new research has revealed.

Critics say the rise of quangos under the Labour government has produced wasteful and confusing duplication of roles.

While £85m is given to the Carbon Trust to advise businesses and government bodies on becoming low carbon, £22m is handed over to Envirowise to do almost exactly the same thing.

The Food Standards Agency extols the health benefits of a low-fat diet and yet millions are being spent on food promotion bodies that implore the public to eat more sausages and chips.

The research is in a report by the TaxPayers’ Alliance. It says these largely unseen and unaccountable bodies spend £101 billion a year, the equivalent of £1,662 for each person in Britain.

This is despite the call by Gordon Brown in 1995, when he was the shadow chancellor, for a “bonfire of quangos”.

It is a sensitive issue for Brown’s government. Last year the Cabinet Office stopped publishing a detailed breakdown of the bodies’ finances and provided overall figures claiming that Britain had 827 public bodies that cost the taxpayer £32 billion. The TaxPayers’ Alliance accuses the government of concealing the true scale of the UK’s quango empire.

Taking into account public corporations, delivery agencies, government-backed investment funds and nonministerial departments, it has uncovered 1,162 quangos.

They include behemoths such as the Housing Corporation, which had a £1.64 billion budget last year, and more exotic bodies such as the Zoos Forum and the Great Britain-China Centre.

Ben Farrugia, the report’s author, said the growth of quangos had led to waste, duplication and conflicting agendas. He said: “Ministers are concealing a huge section of government from those who pay for it.”

So not only does the Carbon Trust – which employs 126 staff and pays Tom Delay, its chief executive, more than £200,000 a year – have a similar remit to that of Envirowise, but there is also a third body. The Energy Saving Trust advises homeowners on reducing their carbon footprint. With 142 staff, it costs £43.2m.

Envirowise and the Energy Saving Trust denied there was any duplication. The Carbon Trust insisted it did not waste money, citing a National Audit Office report that states it is “doing a good job”.

However, the environment department said last week that it was so concerned about an overlap that it was conducting an “efficiency review” of the three bodies, to be published at the end of the year.

Quangos often seem at odds with one another, critics say. The Potato Council has a £6m budget and employs 49 staff. While other arms of the government warn the public not to eat too many fatty foods such as chips, the Potato Council is marketing a national chip week. It says: “Chip week is a fun PR campaign to remind consumers that chips, made from British potatoes, can be enjoyed as part of a healthy, balanced diet.”

Farrugia said: “Because they are insulated from proper scrutiny, quango bureaucrats are rarely made to pay the price for failure. The result is that many do the same thing in effect, while others operate at cross-purposes.”

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