You Know When You’ve Been Quangoed

Sir Peter Kemp, Second Permanent Secretary at the Treasury was appointed. He set up a small unit within the Cabinet Office to implement the reforms, which he did with considerable panache and alacrity and against much departmental resistance. By the early 1990s over 100 agencies had been established.  Some were very large such as the Benefits Agency with over 40,000 people and some very small such the Wilton Park conference centre with just 40. After Thatcher’s departure political commitment was lost and the knives were out from the ‘mandarins’ for the radically reforming but inconvenient Kemp who was forced leave the civil service in 1992. By that time the bandwagon was rolling, and some agencies secured a wider remit with ‘trading fund’ status and CEOs as Accounting Officers (i.e. accountable directly to Parliament)

Over the years the agency concept has fallen out of fashion to a large extent though 70 have been created since 2010.  In the early years of the Coalition government, Francis Maude promised to light a bonfire of the quangos – but unless we missed something, the blaze didn’t take hold. Typically agencies were either re-badged or went back to their department as was the case with the Borders Agency to the Home Office.

Was the agency experiment successful and what lessons for the much anticipated reform of the civil service?

There is little doubt that the executive agencies were an innovative and radical reform that achieved much in modernising the civil service.  But they were subjected to continued interference by successive governments who were able to change, abolish, create these agencies easily and arbitrarily. This contrasted with bodies created by statute such as the Health and Safety Executive (1974 Act) that have been able to withstand the political vicissitudes much more successfully.

The lessons learnt are that the agencies can be the effective and efficient delivery agents for government supported by legislation with policies driven by a small core of departmental staff working direct to ministers. Terms and conditions should be civil service wide to allow maximum flexibility and equity, reform must have the direct interest and support of the Prime Minister and, crucially, a dynamic project director – another Sir Peter Kemp – who can remake the central British state, and quickly.