Donald Trump and the UK's Quangocracy
A significant element of the current turmoil in the United States is an attack on what we would call public or arms length bodies (ALBs).
For historical reasons, the American Congress has often passed laws that amounted to vague statements of intent, leaving judgment calls to the career civil servants who staffed the regulatory bureaucracies. The courts adopted a deferential stance toward those bureaucracies, and Presidents were assumed to value a balance between loyalty to their policies and administrative competence in delivering those policies. Critics complained that Presidents often opted not to exercise adequate guidance over the bureaucracies they nominally oversaw and ran.
For those that advise and surround Donald Trump, the result of the above is that the USA had entered a ‘post-constitutional moment’ in which it was ruled by an unelected and unaccountable ‘fourth branch’ of government. They reject the notion of bureaucratic independence which had previously been claimed by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve banking system, as well as (most ominously) by the Justice Department.
These critics are buoyed by recent court decisions such as Chevron and Trump v. United States. They argue that the President is in charge of the departments and agencies that reside within the executive branch. In short, he is their boss, he has wide immunity, and they must do as he wishes. Competence ranks a long way below loyalty when it come to hiring and firing agency leaders.
It couldn’t happen here, could it? Well … I have lost track of the number of complaints, over the years, that we now live in a ‘regulatory state’ whose institutions are undemocratic and unaccountable. Critics argue that regulators etc. should pay more attention to the Government’s agenda and their leaders should be politically faithful. Those slow to jump to attention should be sacked - as has recently happened to the Chair of the CMA.
My own view is that most of the criticisms are unfair but I worry that (just like in the States) our politicians have lost interest in the many bodies to which they have delegated a great deal of power. Much evidence for this can be found in the latest Reform Think Tank report which examines what they cheerfully call Quangocracy. You can read it here.
The report is a sobering indictment of successive governments’ and successive Parliaments’ failure to ensure the accountability and performance management of public bodies. According to the authors:
Only around 250 civil servants are responsible for overseeing the accountability and performance management of public bodies that together employ at least 390,000 staff and spend over £350 billion of public money each year.
Successive waves of public body reform have left a complex, and largely opaque, landscape of public bodies that have very different governance structures, legal status, degrees of autonomy, and relationships with sponsor departments12.
Around 85% of public bodies have not been called before the Public Accounts Committee in the last four years.
Select committees covering many major departments, including the Home Office, Department of Health and Social Care, and Ministry of Justice, have not held a single inquiry dedicated to the performance and effectiveness of the public bodies their department sponsors in the last four years.
Roles in sponsorship are often seen as less interesting, with a lower impact on career progression than, for example, positions in policy-focused teams or private office. As the Chief Executive of a public body explained: “Who in the civil service wants to progress their career by going into sponsorship? Nobody. That’s not where they’ll get promoted. It’s not people who are future stars”.
Interviewees argued that the majority of senior civil servants want to work in prestigious, policy-oriented roles, not overseeing delivery through public bodies. One argued: “There is genuinely a lack of curiosity and a lack of interest from leadership … The priorities of the senior civil service are completely out of touch with the delivery work of government [which is why] we can’t deliver services for shit”.
Possibly as a result of this lack of attention, Reform’s interviewees described “pernicious examples”, of “pure, delivery public bodies” pursuing policy aims that are tangential to their core purpose, or even misaligned with what government as a whole is trying to accomplish”.
Comment
Reform’s criticisms are valid - and they also echo those heard on the other side of the Atlantic.
And the criticisms are hardly new. My own Introduction to Regulation (Part 7 of How to Succeed in the SCS) as well as my Understanding Regulation website contain far too many examples of serious regulatory failures, all of which will be familiar to readers of this blog - or indeed of any newspaper.
It is about time, surely, that parliamentarians take seriously the criticisms summarised by Reform and show rather more interest in the activities of the agencies, non-ministerial departments and other ALBs to which they have delegated such a lot of power. There is no need to reduce their independence. That would be the wrong way to go. But they should be properly resourced, properly monitored by their parent departments, and challenged if they appear not to be performing efficiently and effectively.
Martin Stanley
I identify and describe the the various public bodies in this web page.
A full list of the departments, agencies and other public bodies known to the Cabinet Office is here. It includes 605 bodies, as follows:-
The Prime Minister’s Office
24 Ministerial Departments
20 Non-Ministerial Departments
424 Agencies & Other Public Bodies
114 High Profile Groups
19 Public Corporations
3 Devolved Governments
How specifically do you propose to assess the value for money of an ALB ?