Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Scholar at the International Security Program, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a World Fellow at Yale University.
Everybody is talking about cutting the number of quangos, organisations set up by the government. Unlike companies like Woolworths, which can go bust if not enough people have any use for what they’re doing, once a quango is created it will exist forever until a minister or civil servant decides to shrink or abolish it. And unlike a company, we pay for its services through taxes whether we want to or not, whether or not we find it useful.
There has never been a better time for cutting wasteful spending on quangos than right now. In this financial climate, companies all over the world are having to tighten their belts, and us taxpayers understand that government should do the same.But saying that is the easy part. The hard part is doing the hard thinking about which quangos are worth keeping, and which should go. What is needed is a sort of ‘Dragons’ Den’ for quangos, in which each can be grilled in turn by a sceptical panel about whether what they do is actually worth doing.
So, in that spirit, here are some suggestions for what the dragons might ask.
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