Downing Street Says

» Thursday, October 14, 2010

Quangos

Asked how many quangos were actually disappearing as a result of that day’s announcement, the PMS said that as a result of the announcement more than half of those bodies would be reformed in some way to ensure that they were designed in the right way to do their job. As Frances Maude was making clear in his interviews that day, the test that was being applied when reviewing all those bodies was did it provide a technical function, did it need to be politically impartial, and did it need to act independently from ministers to establish facts.

Asked why this would ensure more accountability, the PMS replied that by bringing a function into a department the minister would be directly accountable. And that accountability had always been a key part of the review, as well as driving efficiencies.

Asked why the Government was unable to put a figure on total savings, the PMS replied that would come out in the spending review. Most of the bodies received money through departmental budgets, and departments would make judgements on how much they wanted to reduce individual bodies’ budgets.

Asked how we would know we had achieved efficiencies, the PMS replied that departments would be operating in a tougher financial climate and would need to find savings. The kind of reforms we were making and the nature of the review had been to look for efficiencies.

Asked when we would be able to make further announcements on the future of those bodies, the PMS said we had reviewed 900 bodies and we had made firm decisions on the direction of travel on the vast majority of them. We had decided to substantially reform 481 of them in the space of a few months. Necessarily these big changes to the structure of Government would take some time to implement, and we needed to make sure we did that properly.

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Quangos

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