Vicious government axe gives quangos slight trim

Time for some more evidence-based blogging.

Last week the government published the list of proposals for changes to various non-departmental bodies (Quangos – quasi non-governmental organisations). This was (a) not a list of all the quangos to be abolished, nor (b) was it a list of the fate of all quangos. It was the fate of those that were up for review (i.e. not all of them).

No doubt the coalition will be characterising this as massive efficiency savings; no doubt the opposition will characterise them as massively cruel cuts. Frankly, I don’t care. Nearly all politics reporting seems to be about what people are saying or implying is the case, and parsing these statements is dull. I’m more interested in what is actually the case.

I found government funding costs for most of the quangos on the list, but not all. I have other things to do with my time which means that I am working from an incomplete data set. So this analysis is incomplete, but it includes actual figures I calculated myself which is probably more than Nick Robinson does. Each quango had some comments on its fate – it wasn’t always simple as “abolish”, “retain” etc so I made a few broad categories and assigned each quango to one of these. No doubt I’ve made some errors here, but like I said I have other things to do.

Of the 367 bodies listed:

• 103 are to be abolished
• 18 are to be merged
• 32 are to be reconstituted
• 171 are to be retained
• 42 are still under consideration

I’m not sure where the 192 figure that is being quoted comes from (although in my list adding all those not in the “to be retained” category comes to 195, so perhaps I have misallocated a couple of them); I also have no idea where the BBC gets its figures, even though it links to the pdf I link to above and used in this analysis.

For the ones I could get financial data for:

• 54 received no (central?) government funding at all
• The most expensive quango was the BBC (£4.4bn)
• The average cost was £84m

The combined costs were £18bn. Five bodies – Environment Agency, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, Olympic Delivery Authority, Homes and Communities Agency, and the BBC – accounted for half of this, and they were all retained.

The graph below shows the combined costs of those that were abolished, those that were retained, and so on. As you can see, in cost terms very little was actually cut.

The next graph shows (the fairly trivial observation) that generally, the more expensive a body is, the more likely it is to survive.

As I said, the data set is incomplete, and it doesn’t accord with what the BBC et al are saying. Perhaps there is another list of quangos, but the one I linked to seemed to be the one that everyone was linking to as the definitive one. Perhaps my pdf-to-Excel conversion has let me down. Perhaps I committed an egregious sorting error in Excel. Perhaps the data I am missing would completely change the story. Perhaps.

And perhaps you shouldn’t trust what the media regurgitate for you. Or me. In fact, here is the dataset I was working from, complete with sources, just so I can be all open-source.

Reality check – UK spending “cuts”

Time for some evidence-based blogging, particularly in light of recent trade union idiocy, and the on-going fantasy-based world of Labour.

Nothing complicated, nothing new (data courtesy of Adam Smith, and no doubt elsewhere), but curiously missing from “the narrative”.  The graph below shows the extent of the spending “cuts”.

Oh look, spending is going up.  Not down, but up; the opposite of down.  Spending, you might say, is increasing; that is, more is being spent.  The distance of spending from zero is increasing over time, in a positive direction.  If we had a pile of pound coins representing the spending for each year, the later piles would be taller than the earlier piles.  Truly, Thatcher walks among us once more (because she never cut spending either).