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Chris Leslie, Director, NLGN
Yorkshire Post

Is it fair that two London boroughs with a population of 240,000 have more influence on the boards of this country’s quangos than the entire county of Yorkshire (population 5.1million)? You may not realise it, but power and decision-making in the UK isn’t only exercised through the House of Commons or House of Lords, but daily through non-elected “public bodies” constituted as arms-length agencies of Government, with appointees overseeing £123 billion of taxpayer’s money. These “quangos” – shorthand for ‘quasi-non-governmental organisations’ – spend roughly the same amount of public money as elected local authorities, but operate under far less scrutiny, despite being ultimately accountable to Ministers. Government departments have set up thousands of quangos in the past two decades, started in part by the Thatcher administration as a first step towards outsourcing large chunks of the public sector. Some were eventually privatised, but many others continue to operate as nominally independent bodies reliant on taxpayer funding, for instance, the Arts Council, Sport England, the BBC, the Environment Agency.

In order to shed some light on where power is held in Britain today, the New Local Government Network decided to conduct a survey of the primary residential addresses of over 1000 board members with seats on the country’s largest quangos. We wanted to see if all corners of the nation were fairly represented in these public bodies, or if these appointments had a bias in a particular direction. It took some time to persuade these quangos to reveal simply which local authority area their board members lived in – some using the excuse of privacy or data protection to keep this basic information private.

The results are startling, but perhaps confirm what many feel to be true; that power is centralised and gravitates around the capital city, and London dominates almost every decision-making forum in Britain today. The four London boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Islington and Kensington & Chelsea together have more clout than the entire north of England. Greater London residents account for 36% of seats on public bodies, despite representing only 14.8% of the population. Yorkshire’s residents hold only 6% of seats on our quangos, despite representing 10% of the population.

Worse still, there are whole parts of the country where it appears no-one is deemed worthy to appoint to any national public body. Bradford and East Yorkshire barely register on the national quangocrat lists and we couldn’t find a single resident from Hull sitting on a quango with England-wide responsibility! There is an important principle at stake here, the principle of fairness and the basic democratic concept that everyone is of equal worth regardless of where they live or where they come from. But more than this, it is a sign of poor management if the issues affecting service users in whole swathes of the country are not heard or aired because no-one is there to speak up for them. Making sure that we are governed well must surely involve sharing power evenly across the country. If the people chosen to make decisions are skewed towards one part of England and away from another, who is to say that the actual decisions themselves are not also skewed?

It cannot be the case that there is nobody of sufficient merit living in these unrepresented parts of the country. So how else are these quango ‘deserts’ explained? The appointment process to the boards of public bodies is too hidden and obscure, and too often it is only those already ‘in-the-know’ who navigate the system. All vacancies should be opened up to public view, with better advertising and perhaps even an invitation to elected representatives in the regions to proactively nominate people from their area. Eventually, many of the quangos should be democratised and integrated into democratically elected local authorities. In the meantime, Government should monitor the ‘national diversity’ of the appointments it is making and it should publish each Minister’s performance in filling posts from broader backgrounds. We should insist that more of the headquarters of quangos are relocated out of the capital and in the regions, which in turn would prompt greater diversity in their work and governance. And when vacancies are advertised they should explicitly state that applicants from outside the south east would be especially welcomed!

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