Accountability and Quasi-Government: The Role of Parliamentary Questions
While much concern has been expressed about the accountability of quasi‐government there has been little empirical research on the subject. Similarly, the literature lacks a thorough assessment of the contribution of parliamentary questions to holding governmental institutions accountable. In this paper part of this gap in the literature is closed by measuring the extent to which a wide range of executive non‐departmental public bodies (ENDPBs) are held accountable by the use of questions tabled in the House of Commons. Questions asked to ministers in the Foreign Office and the Department for Education and Employment about ENDPBs they sponsor are assessed. A similar exercise is conducted on the agencies in these two departments and the results compared. In general, the partisan political atmosphere of the Commons, the apathy of many MPs, the size of the ENDPB sector and the rules governing questions mean that their contribution to the accountability of these bodies is relatively small. In particular, many...
Accountability, control and complexity: moving beyond ministerial responsibility
There are several bodies of opinion showing concern and even excitement over the wide variety of governmental bodies which has grown up in modern Britain. On the right in politics there are the anti-state critics of bureaucracy who want to see public powers cut back and expenditures reduced. For them these bodies are symptomatic of a public sector out of control. Generally on the left-hand side of the political spectrum are those who dislike appointed boards and commissions for the patronage they represent and their remoteness from popular or democratic control. Such critics often approve of the particular activities carried out by this or that body but are suspicious of the elitism and the claims to technical expertise held to be an inherent risk in such administrative devices. On more neutral ground we can find many administrative practitioners and academic students of administration who are worried for rather different reasons. What they suspect is that we may be witnessing the disintegration of the model of representative and responsible ministerial government which took shape in Britain in the course of the last century. Indeed this model was wider in range than the institution of ministerial responsibility itself: in some respects it encompassed local government too through the conferment of statutory powers on elected councils. In other words, the underlying principle established was that of representative and responsible government, and its concomitant organisational model was, at the centre, the Government ministry or Department.
Quangos and Local Governance
Concern about quangos is not new but has again become a much publicised theme within contemporary debates on the nature of government. Whilst national and regional bodies such as the Housing Corporation and the various funding councils for education have a significant impact on the governance of localities, the focus of this chapter is on those local quangos which have proliferated in recent years and which now deliver a considerable portion of the policies, programmes and services which affect people’s everyday lives. Specifically the approach is to survey eleven kinds of nonelected public body (despite the terminological confusion hereafter referred to as quangos) which operate at the local level in the health, education, housing, training and urban development sectors: District Health Authorities (DHAs), Family Health Services Authorities (FHSAs), and NHS hospital trusts; Higher Education Corporations, Further Education Corporations, grant maintained schools, and City Technology Colleges (CTCs); Housing Action Trusts (HATs) and housing associations; Urban Development Corporations (UDCs), and Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs). The central contextual factor is that there are well over 4800 local quangos with a total budget of over £37 billion, that is almost two-thirds of the equivalent allocation of central government money to local government. Equally important, the ‘new local magistracy’ in England and Wales numbers well in excess of 50 000 compared with under 23 000 elected local councillors.1