A bonfire of the quangos

Public managers will have been poring over the leaked list of the government's review of quangos with sinking hearts. While media and online comments have focused, inevitably, on which of the quangos on the leaked list deserve to exist, there are two more important aspects of this exercise that deserve greater attention. One is, of course, the cost of such wholesale change to the machinery of government. It's not yet clear how much it will cost if the government does indeed go ahead with its plans to scrap at least 177 quangos, privatise four and merge a further 129. The cost of change in other parts of government have been highlighted in the past week. One report estimates that it may cost up to £1.5bn to abolish England's regional development agencies, and the final bill may be even higher for the two departments involved, the business and skills department and the communities and local government department. But there is another factor involved in this scale of change, which is that it will take up huge amounts of senior management time, resources and effort, both within the quangos themselves and within their sponsoring Whitehall departments. Can the civil service afford that kind of resource being spent on machinery of government changes at a time when, more than ever before, it could be argued they need to concentrate on planning for the future, after the comprehensive spending review on 20th October? It seems a long time since the government came to power in May, saying it was listening to advice not to change the machinery of government, in line with recommendations from senior civil servants and influential thinktank the Institute for Government. In May, the institute jointly published with the LSE a report saying that machinery of government changes are "often announced at short notice, usually poorly managed and always costly". It quoted senior civil servants who said that political motivation for change led to poor planning and "unprofessional" change management practice. That study followed a ­devastating report published in March by the National Audit ­Office, which showed the high costs and dislocation caused by creating and merging departments. A bonfire of the quangos is always a populist move. And yes, it's really easy to mock, as so many have, some of these bodies. But such a sweeping move will take up senior managers' time for months inside departments that really do have better things to do, at the same time as destroying staff morale.