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A thread about the Quango cutbacks..

weltweit

weltweit

Well-Known Member
Lots are being completely axed, many are being merged, more are being sucked into the civil service.

What do people think?
 
it seems alot of the savings will take as long as 10 years to materialise. the lose of the consumer watchdog is telling. fuel prices
will certainly rise as will erroneous service charges.
 
Government Hospitality Advisory Committee on the purchase of Wines - attached to the FCO - will be abolished! :)
 
Interesting that the news keeps mentioning the Wine thing while not mentioning the much more important ones that are being cut too.
 
The wine one and the other crappy sounding quangos are actually very small advisory committe's and any money saved is a drop in the ocean of gouverment spending and distract from more importent organisation such as the UK film council (though they did have too many overpaid people) and British Waterways.
 
more evidence that the Tories haven't thought through their plans. as the poster above says this has gone from being about saving money to accountability. we could put that down to spin, but when you look at the headline figures and then dig deeper it does look like there will be little savings made, and its generally smaller quangos being "scrapped". and they can't put numbers on job losses or "savings".

i'm forming the view that they don't really know what they're doing from one day to next.
 
as for accountability, scrapping the body that reviews the work of the Planning Inspectorate because the Inspectorate now self-review their work: laughable.



Advisory Panel on Standards for the Planning Inspectorate

Abolished

No longer an NDPB - Abolished body. The Planning Inspectorate has an internal challenge process that offers quality assurance
Click to expand...
 
Also interesting that the CAB's mean to be taking on additional work. Given CABs are currently extremely stretched and rely heavily on volunteers, not really clear how that's going to work.
 
Unfortunately for the Tories, Philip Green's report on waste points out (indirectly) that the quango-cutting policy is moronic. Toynbee did a good article on this:

Take just one example: the very first quango the coalition axed was Becta, the clunkily named British Educational Communications and Technology Agency. It's easy to imagine Michael Gove, newly arrived in his education department eager to swing his axe, turning up his nose at its rather mushy self-description: "Becta leads the national drive to inspire and lead the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning." Off with its head! Oops ... actually what it does is procure the best computers and programmes for schools as effectively and cheaply as possible, in exactly the way Sir Philip Green says all departments should.

Once it has gone, all headteachers will be on their own, thumbing through brochures, subjected to marketing calls from sales reps trying to bamboozle them with gizmos and super-new electronic teaching aids that may be the best or the worst. Even if teachers succeed in choosing the best, they will get the worst prices without mass purchasing. Academies and free schools will be on their own, as will free-standing hospitals and GP consortiums – all in hot competition with one another, overseen by the hospital regulator Monitor, charged with ensuring they compete, not co-operate.

Green's report seems entirely non-political, and he seems unaware of the impossible contradictions he has landed on the government. To him this is just plain business sense: the government is one entity, national and local. For maximum efficiency it should behave like one entity. Individualistic localism and fierce competition between its components are simply not compatible with the idea of efficiency he expects from a single enterprise, with a single united objective – to produce the best services possible for the cheapest price.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/11/sir-philip-green-quango-waste
Click to expand...

It's moronic. They've been banging the populist drum about quangos for so long, they have not stopped to think. This came up on Question Time earlier (but not the link with the Green report, sadly). Jowell pointed out that New Labour had reduced the number of quangos from 1300 to 700, so it's hardly a Labour policy to have too many of them, and the audience gasped when one of the panel members pointed out that the BBC was a quango, like they hadn't realised that it was, and they probably hadn't the way they're talked about.

Hastings kept banging on about them being vehicles to hand jobs to Labour's mates, ignoring the fact that the Tories mates are probably too busy dodging tax in Belize or ruining the economy in The City to take on work with much lower financial rewards (not saying the quango bosses aren't overpaid, mind, just not compared to the private sector). Noone picked him up on that either. He was a fucking prick all round - he even interrupted an audience member's question at one point, to make an entirely unrelated speech. Rude over-bearing oik that he is. :mad:
 
"What people find so irritating is the sense that there is this huge amount of activity incontinently set up, much of it by the last government, by bodies which are not in any way accountable - no one can be held accountable for what they do and that is what we are seeking to change," he told MPs.
Click to expand...

See, this is just ignorant crap. Of course they're fucking accountable. I used to work on reports for NICE and we had endless fucking meetings with them and the Department of Health to determine what NICE needed, what that would cost and whether DH would pay for it, and how we could demonstrate value for money. The only money that got wasted was not enough topics coming through near an election because the fucking minister wouldn't sign off the list for fear of the headlines. :mad:

The Government Hospitality Advisory Committee on the Purchase of Wines will also be abolished, but ministers are considering whether another body should continue its work.
Click to expand...
:rolleyes:
 
weltweit said:
Lots are being completely axed, many are being merged, more are being sucked into the civil service.

What do people think?
Click to expand...

I think it's a good idea to cut quite a few of the quangoes, transferring their roles into the civil service will do little to help and probably even make things worse. The civil servants have scored a massive hit in winning that one.
 
moon23 said:
I think it's a good idea to cut quite a few of the quangoes, transferring their roles into the civil service will do little to help and probably even make things worse. The civil servants have scored a massive hit in winning that one.
Click to expand...

this makes no sense.
 
fractionMan said:
this.

British waterways being made into a charity. That'll go well.
Click to expand...

I'm going to tell them to make more money by telling rich people who leave their boats to rot on moorings for years on end that their lease is terminated. They can warehouse them in some farmers' fields or struggling marinas (if the owner wants somewhere to keep it) and charge an extra year's mooring fees for removal if the owner doesn't do it themselves. And then auction the spot so that someone who actually wants to use it can. People can't take the piss like that on allotments or council housing, why should these shits be allowed to abuse public space. Besides, it's breaking the terms of their mooring agreements. :)

Do you think NABO would be interested, or do BW hate them so much that it wouldn't help? No point asking the IWA - it's mostly their members' boats I want removed.:D Need to get it in at the middle of BW to someone who cares but doesn't have dinner with the rich fucks of the IWA. Any suggestions?
 
The name is. The BBC has been around for quite a while. The MRC has been around since at least 1948.
 
ymu said:
I'm going to tell them to make more money by telling rich people who leave their boats to rot on moorings for years on end that their lease is terminated. They can warehouse them in some farmers' fields or struggling marinas (if the owner wants somewhere to keep it) and charge an extra year's mooring fees for removal if the owner doesn't do it themselves. And then auction the spot so that someone who actually wants to use it can. People can't take the piss like that on allotments or council housing, why should these shits be allowed to abuse public space. Besides, it's breaking the terms of their mooring agreements. :)

Do you think NABO would be interested, or do BW hate them so much that it wouldn't help? No point asking the IWA - it's mostly their members' boats I want removed.:D Need to get it in at the middle of BW to someone who cares but doesn't have dinner with the rich fucks of the IWA. Any suggestions?
Click to expand...

I don't think it'll wash tbh. They have a hard enough time keeping abandoned boats of the canals let alone the marinas. Plus, it can be argued marinas are not public spaces like allotments. Online moorings, maybe. But then, they're specifically designated for boats that are hardly ever used :D

I think the new BW is going to have to get money from local governments where the canals pass through for things like towpath maintenance. A bit like an outsourced park.
 
fractionMan said:
I don't think it'll wash tbh. They have a hard enough time keeping abandoned boats of the canals let alone the marinas. Plus, it can be argued marinas are not public spaces like allotments. Online moorings, maybe. But then, they're specifically designated for boats that are hardly ever used :D

I think the new BW is going to have to get money from local governments where the canals pass through for things like towpath maintenance. A bit like an outsourced park.
Click to expand...

I'm talking about getting boats off BW towpath moorings and into marinas if the owners have left the boat to rot. They're not abandoned as such - the mooring fees are still being paid. They just don't deserve to have a nice mooring if they don't look after their boat. It's even in the terms & conditions that they have to keep the boat in good external condition, so no change of law required. The marinas thing is just to give them somewhere else to keep the boat if they don't want to sell or scrap it.

/derail
 
Sue said:
Also interesting that the CAB's mean to be taking on additional work. Given CABs are currently extremely stretched and rely heavily on volunteers, not really clear how that's going to work.
Click to expand...

they rely heavily on money from the council too - how much spare money will your local council have after the spending review!!
 
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