Almost a third of all government spending, £391 billion a year, is not spent by government departments. It is spent by 438 separate publicly funded bodies that ministers cannot direct, Parliament cannot easily scrutinise, and voters cannot remove. Within these 438 bodies, 315 people are paid more than the Prime Minister. The older term is quango. Attempting to move on from that, the government now prefers to name them as an “arm’s-length body”. The name is irrelevant. Public money, public power, no public control. That is an extraordinary fact, and it should be treated like one. At a time when taxes are at all-time highs and public services are crumbling, a third of all public spending is flowing through bodies most people have never heard of, run by people they cannot vote out, under structures Parliament struggles to follow. The EU template. Half a million people work for these bodies. Their spending has risen 243 per cent in a decade. The biggest, NHS England at £175 billion, the Education and Skills Funding Agency at £72 billion, HMRC at £41 billion, are government departments in everything but name and accountability. No single document consolidates what all 438 of them do. When Parliament wants to know where £391 billion went, it has to ask 438 separate questions. Every government promises to fix this. Every government makes it worse. Blair created 92 quangos, more than any other Prime Minister. Cameron’s 2010 “bonfire of the quangos” abolished 192, but most functions quietly migrated into new bodies and net savings were modest (spending still increased). 2Tier Keir has created 27 since July 2024. One of them, quite ironically, is called the Office for Value for Money. The arm’s-length principle is not a British invention, but Britain is alone in having adopted it without the safeguards other countries built alongside it.
Sweden, the Netherlands, and New Zealand all built in consolidated accounts, measurable targets, and mechanisms to revoke delegation when it fails. Britain has the delegation without the transparency, the autonomy without the recall, and the spending without the consolidated account. Four hundred and thirty-eight bodies, and a convention, not a law, that ministers do not direct them. That gap would be serious enough if it were only financial. It is not. This structure does not just waste money. It costs lives. Seema Misra ran the post office in West Byfleet. In 2008, she was suspended over a £74,000 shortfall that did not exist. On 11 November 2010, her son’s tenth birthday, she was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. She was eight weeks pregnant with her second child. She served four and a half months and gave birth in prison wearing an electronic tag. Her conviction was overturned in 2021. The Post Office’s then managing director, David Smith, marked her conviction with an internal email to his team. “Brilliant news. Well done.” Misra was one of more than 900 sub-postmasters, small business owners running local branches on contract, prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 for accounting shortfalls in their tills. The shortfalls did not exist. They were generated by bugs in the Horizon IT system, built and maintained by Fujitsu. The evidence that Horizon was unreliable was available inside the Post Office from almost the beginning. The prosecutions continued anyway. People were imprisoned. People were bankrupted. Marriages collapsed. At least thirteen of the prosecuted sub-postmasters killed themselves. Ministers were aware of a potential issue, but no action was taken. Post Office Ltd is government-owned but arm’s-length, so the minister could not direct it. The board deferred to executives. The executives relied on assurances from Fujitsu. The courts eventually overturned convictions, after twenty years, but could not rewind the lives that had been broken. No individual in that chain did anything the governance framework forbade. The framework was the problem. Strip it down and the architecture rests on a single move. Decisions are removed from people who can be voted out and given to people who cannot. When hundreds of innocent people were being prosecuted on the basis of software nobody could defend, no democratic mechanism existed to stop it. The public pays for these bodies. The public has no control over them. That is the first step in the pattern. Power is moved away from public control. The next question is who fills the space that opens up.
© DJM 2026
