A real bonfire of the quangos means more ministers, more spads, and longer sitting hours for MPs

Yesterday’s Sunday Times reported that “Starmer and Reeves plan to make a series of announcements this week going hell for leather to boost economic growth.” We can only believe it when we see it, I guess.

In fairness, it isn’t obvious that this Government has been entirely cognisant of just how badly it has been tying its own shoelaces together on this until now, for example by freighting its plans to unlock new land for development with absurdly maximalist requirements for biodiversity net gain, affordable housing, and so on.

But this time it’s pretty simple. If the Prime Minister is serious about delivering growth above all else, he can abandon the Employment Rights Bill. If he doesn’t – and it’s hard to imagine Angela Rayner letting him – then this is all talk.

On the subject of talk, the Daily Telegraph reports that Labour is also planning a bonfire of the quangos:

“Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has written to ministers asking them to justify all quangos that operate under their departments, with a view to closing many of them later this year.

“The Telegraph understands that some of the bodies could be scrapped by passing legislation, and the first bodies to be axed could be identified as soon as this week.”

Unlike growth, however, there are a few grounds for optimism here – not least of which is that the Government has already abolished NHS England, a very large quango indeed.

More importantly, Labour seems more willing to face up to the real questions involved in kindling such a bonfire: what happens to the people, and what happens to the powers. This is where the Conservatives, who tend to be much more vocal when it comes to complaining about quangos, tend to fall short. Consider NHS England again:

“The abolition of NHS England sparked mass panic from civil servants, who fear they will lose their jobs. Wes Streeting announced that the restructure would lead to thousands of staff, whose jobs are replicated between NHS England and the Department for Health, being laid off.”

In this case, what happened to the powers was that they were returned to direct departmental control. So too did the people – excepting those thousands performing duplicate roles who weren’t needed at the Department of Health.

The job losses are the really critical thing. Note that Wes Streeting is not trying to reduce the size of the state here; NHS England’s former powers will simply be exercised from a different place. Despite that, there was still substantial scope for staff reductions, because those civil servants directly involved in exercising those powers can simply be slotted into the Department’s org chart.

Any abolition aimed at actually shrinking the scope of government would, logically, involve redundancies on an even larger scale, because some or all of those specialised staff would be rendered superfluous as well.

If, on the other hand, the death of a quango simply sees 100 per cent of its workforce redeployed to other agencies – as seems to have been the case with the previous government’s ‘abolition’ of Public Health England in 2021 – then it has probably not achieved anything at all.

Even if the intention is simply to better distribute its powers, there ought to be duplicated roles whose occupants can be safely released into the productive economy. If it doesn’t, the minister has delivered merely a Yes, Minister reorganisation, retaining both workforces with “an extra layer of coordinating management on top”, as Sir Humphrey put it.

Labour’s focus is likely to be more on controlling the state than cutting it, with the Telegraph saying that: “Ministers have been told to take more responsibility for their policy areas, and warned that arm’s-length bodies should not be given responsibility for decisions of “national importance” unless they are required by law to be made by an independent body.”

That could still deliver substantial benefits, however, and not just in terms of reducing the Civil Service wage bill.

One of the biggest drawbacks of empowering quangos is that they have very narrow remits, yet can these days often impose huge costs and delays on other parts of the system – as when Natural England changed its rules and brought housebuilding to a screeching halt. (Perhaps, now they have scalped NHSE, we need a Reform paper on abolishing them next.)

Even if government is exercising the same powers, it is much better able to exercise them whilst taking an holistic view both of the trade-offs involved and, crucially, the government’s own political priorities.

(This second one might cause some pearl-clutching amongst those who thing we should be governed by independent panels selected by other independent panels, but democracy requires the political exercise of power. Otherwise you don’t have democracy.)

However, this is where we must sound the note of caution. It’s all very well to bring powers back under democratic control on paper. But they can only be controlled in practice if politicians are prepared to expend the time and energy to actually do so – and that is much less certain.

Part of this is governmental. Wes Streeting, for example, has just seen his department take on expansive new responsibilities. Will his ministerial team be expanded to reflect this? What about the spad team?

If they aren’t, actual political oversight will be at best sporadic – exercised only when the Sauronic eye of the Secretary of State is drawn, too late, by some crisis or other – or at worst nominal. A good example of the latter is the Home Office; a constant thread when I was researching my paper on breaking it up was complaints from the political side that it is simply too big to control.

But the other, even more intractable part is parliamentary. To cut a long story short, power has flowed away from Parliament in no small part because MPs couldn’t be bothered. They gleefully colluded with Robin Cook’s plans to slash their sitting hours in the early Noughties, and have only grown less diligent since then. Rob Colvile has described the impact:

“Civil servants are increasingly bringing legislation to parliament half-formed, in the belief that they can fix it in the edit. Angela Rayner’s workplace rights bill was introduced only two months ago, and the government has already proposed more than 100 amendments.

“Part of that rescue work is done in Commons committees. But the real burden falls on the House of Lords — whose members are ever more despairing about what they have to work with.”

To that list he could have added the courts – empowered by lazy ‘have regard’ clauses passed by MPs trying to make an impact without doing the work – and quangos, not to mention devolved bodies and, until recently, Brussels. If Labour want to bring huge areas of responsibility back into the ambit of Parliament, that’s great. But it will require more – and more diligent – legislating and rule-making. More ministers, more spads, more debate, longer sitting hours, later nights.

Given that the new intake of Labour MPs are demanding specific speaking slots so that they can stop having to pretend to actually listen to what other people are saying in the House, the odds of delivering that seem very slim indeed.