The bloated quangos sucking our country dry
ALEX STORY
WHILE the four-months-old US administration has caused some distraction for disturbing the current international order by endeavouring to rebalance trade, a real revolution in governance is taking place.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) headed by Elon Musk has revealed what most of us suspected: our huge deficits are a function of government-led grift. Billions of dollars of quasi-criminal spending is being uncovered.
This explains why taxpayers are paying ever more for ever less; in the worst-case scenario we are paying ever more to feed a beast intent on destroying our civilisation.
Remarkably, Elon Musk is on track to cut the United States deficits by half. Should he succeed in closing the gap between revenue and expenditure by removing fraud at the federal level, he will have transformed the Western world’s prospects and given us hope that the same could be done here in the United Kingdom.
Our country is, it is no exaggeration, already on life support. Not least because the UK’s not-for-profit, life-sucking sector is gigantic, in particular compared with the size of the economy. There are more than 300 quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (quangos), not to speak of the state-funded elements of the charitable sector.
These organisations are designed to operate independently from ministerial control and wield considerable power. They are responsible for regulation, public services and policy implementation.
Figures published yesterday by the TaxPayers’ Alliance showed that at least 1,472 quango staff received over £100,000 in total remuneration (comprising salary, expenses, benefits, bonuses, compensation for loss of office and pension benefits or contributions) in 2023-24, while 315 received a higher salary than the £172,153 of the prime minister.
Here is a list of quangos published by the Adam Smith Institute.
They employ close to 400,000 people on a budget of £390billion per year, nearly 300 per cent more than our total deficit and over a third of our entire yearly £1.3trillion government spend.
Added to this richly funded, unaccountable, relatively new branch of government, we must add the partially or fully state-funded charitable sector, which is in effect the PR arm of the vitality-sapping UK quangocracy.
Nearly a third of the £100billion budget for UK charities comes from the government. Around £30billion is spent by the government on ‘charities’.
For comparison, housing received £5billion; the department of (no) Energy and Net Zero £14billion; policing £18billion for the fiscal year 2024-2025.
This represents a huge amount of lobbying firepower, paid for by the public, often (if not always) against their interest.
These bodies are not accountable.
They are certainly not capitalist revenue generators.
They are leeches.
The people manning them are mainly from what one would generously call the progressive political side of the aisle: anti-business, anti-borders, anti-Western.
The United Kingdom is sinking into the quagmire of mediocrity and potential global irrelevance because successive governments have allowed the growth of permanently funded activist charities and NGOs to become the all-powerful arm of the State’s incontestable power.
Democracy in the shape of our parliament is now but a sham.
There never was a politician who sold to voters the destruction of our car industry, the dismantling of our borders, or the legalisation of either shoplifting or burglary, not to speak of grooming gangs in many towns and cities across the land. But this is exactly what an out-of-reach taxpayer-subsidised politicised public sector has delivered over the last three decades.
Our energy industry, which has burdened us with some of the most expensive electricity prices in the world – four times higher than the US – has been sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero.
Meanwhile, the UK government has cynically moved to take control of British Steel amid fears that the blast furnaces at its Chinese-owned site in Scunthorpe could be at risk of shutting down, essentially ending steel production in the UK, not that what remained was anything to be proud of.
Any reprieve is but a stay of execution. Net Zero zealots are waiting in the wings.
All the while Ed Miliband is looking for a CEO to sit at a desk of an organisation called Great British Energy. The total compensation is advertised at £525,000, no less.
With such budgets, NGOs wield enormous political power and exert veritable and unwanted influence over government policy. Unfortunately, these are largely unaccountable to the voting public. This is little more than political activism dressed up as social justice.
In short, the transmission mechanism between the taxpayer and the State, its supposed servant, is fractured. From one perspective, we, the taxpayers, are milch cows; from another, we are indentured and powerless serfs with no rights but to pay and keep quiet.
Voters have no say, consumers little choice and businesses less freedom. All the while the out-of-touch, inevitably ‘woke’ quangocrat yells from his ivory tower that this societal destruction is for our own good and that he is doing this only to save us from ourselves.
Great Britain will not prosper until the axe is taken to this rotting edifice.
It is high time that they were knocked off the pedestal that self-interested parties built for them. Without cutting the £400billion budget for unelectable power, Britain will never be great again.
This article appeared in Country Squire Magazine on April 28, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
This article (The bloated quangos sucking our country dry) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Alex Story
See Related Article Below
War on the Quangocrats? Let’s start with Homes England
HARRY PHIBBS
Kudos to the Taxpayers Alliance for producing the Quango Rich List 2025. The massive increase in the remit of the state is partly due to Quangos receiving far less scrutiny than they merit. Perversely, the gargantuan scale of their power and spending has left journalists and politicians so befuddled that the task has not been attempted. The sums involved so defy belief that sometimes spending of millions is reported by mistake when billions is the accurate tally. Then we have the difficulty of defining a Quango. Such attempts soon induce a headache. The Government lists 304 “Arm’s Length Bodies of the UK Government” for the financial year 2022/23, the most recent for which figures are available. It adds that in that year, they cost the taxpayer £353.3 billion. (That’s BILLION.) Total public spending that year was £1,151 billion. So it is hardly a trivial matter. Those who breezily dismiss any scope for reduced public spending (all too often including Conservatives) perhaps have not investigated this area with sufficient rigour.
The Cabinet Office offers a breakdown into three categories of these public bodies or Quangos:
“Executive Agency – a public body that acts as an arm of its home department.
“Non-Departmental Public Body – a public body that operates separately from its sponsoring department.
“Non Ministerial Department – a public body that shares many characteristics with a full department, but without a minister and acts separately from any sponsoring department.”
It should not be assumed that all the £353.3 billion is wasted. Some of the money manages to dribble through the leaky bureaucratic hose to be spent on public services. For instance, the Government is abolishing NHS England. That has a budget of £183 billion. However, spending on the NHS will, of course, continue. Bringing it within the Department for Health and Social Care might save a billion or two on duplication and waste. But the change is more about accountability. No longer should we hear the response to some scandal: “Don’t blame me. I’m only the Health Secretary. I’m not responsible for the NHS. It is run at arm’s length.” Local democracy might be a better model. Still, being able to blame Wes Streeting is better than nothing. It is “very courageous” that he is seeking a proper role for himself rather than merely the ceremonial function of rolling up his sleeves for photo opportunities in hospitals with a caring expression.
Anyway, the Taxpayers Alliance research “examines the number of staff at quangos who received over £100,000 in total remuneration in 2023-24.” It finds that:
“At least 1,472 quango staff received over £100,000 in total remuneration (comprising salary, expenses, benefits, bonuses, compensation for loss of office and pension benefits or contributions) in 2023-24.
“In 2023-24, at least 343 quango staff received more than £200,000 in total remuneration. There were 315 quango staff in 2023-24 who received a higher salary, as opposed to total remuneration, than the £172,153 salary entitlement of the prime minister.
“A total of 94 quangos did not provide accounts for 2023-24.”
Who was the “winner”?
“In 2023-24, the quango with the most staff receiving at least £100,000 in total remuneration was Homes England, which had 111.”
Does it provide value for money? Last year an investigation by The i found the following:
“Homes England, the quango supposed to be tackling the housing crisis for Michael Gove the Housing Secretary, has become a consultants’ “gravy train”, dogged by secrecy and a “horrifying lack of focus” verging on the “immoral”, former senior insiders have told i.
“A lavish staff conference held by the agency resembled a “rock concert”, i has been told, with hundreds of people put in hotels for the event including many in four star accommodation.
“The agency, an arm of Mr Gove’s Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities (DLUHC), has also been making increasing use of costly temporary staffing arrangements….
“A former Homes England senior manager who had previously worked for private housebuilding firms told i that they had left demoralised after three years in their role….
“They said that Homes England had been “rinsed” by consultants – architects, engineers, and designers – who were on £800 to £1,000 a day, which was up to 50 per cent more than the private sector builders would pay.
“It felt like a bit of a gravy train,” the ex manager said. “I could have got for an architect for far cheaper but I was told it couldn’t [happen] because they weren’t on the framework. It was very frustrating.”…
“Freedom of Information responses seen by i have revealed another £16m spent on services from the Boston Consulting Group between 2019 and 2023. Tens of millions more have gone on Evolve – an opaque internal “transformation” project.”
Welcome to Quangoland. The upshot, according to its annual report, is that Homes England “enabled the completion of more than 32,300 homes.” Just for the sake of the argument, let us suppose that none of those homes would have been built without its benevolent intervention. The Quango’s total budget, courtesy of the taxpayer was £3.45 billion for that year. So a subsidy of £107,000 for each property built. Even if you are a socialist and believe in state intervention in the building industry that is astonishingly poor value. But if you read on the report adds that only “24,282 completions” were designated as “affordable” housing. So then the subsidy for each property goes up to £142,000.
They might respond that this is a crude measure of performance. That it is all rather more complicated with their array of schemes. For instance, we have the:
“Private Rented Sector Guarantee Scheme – a £3.5bn programme to support the building of new homes for the private rented sector by enabling developers or investors to raise low cost debt to refinance development funding on a long-term basis.”
Indeed. But what is the logic of the Government piling on taxes and regulation to punish the private rented sector and then spraying out subsidies to make up for it? It’s like the Three Stooges film about plumbing. One layer of intervention to compensate for another, with ever increasing chaos.
A far better way to increase the housing supply would be the sale of surplus public sector land for property development – without Homes England getting in the way “facilitiating” the process. Of course, radically liberalising the planning system is an imperative. Stamp Duty also gums up the works. The abolition of Homes England, with a saving of £3.5 billion, could help to reduce it.
For the Conservatives to restore our credibility as a force for freedom and limited Government we should press the Government to dismantle the Quango state. Homes England would be a good place to start.
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