Quango's demise will leave Streeting in the firing line

Is another bonfire of the quangos coming?

- JAMES MOORE

Keir Starmer has turned tough guy, promising to burn off the state's flab. This is even though the Labour government has created, well, 20 quangos during its short time in office. But wait, the UK's biggest no, the world's biggest - NHS England, is for the chop. So that's telling 'em.

The problem with quangos, which the government prefers to call "non-departmental public bodies" or "arm's-length bodies" so there’s probably a quango in charge of official terms, is they have a habit of proliferating like maggots on dead meat.

True, at 304, there are not as many as the more than 800 there were at the quangocracy’s peak. There was a genuine bonfire under the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, which doesn’t elicit many fond memories but did manage to throttle 300 or so of them.

But as you can see from the figures, there is still an awful lot hanging around.

The prime function of some of the bigger quangos often seems to be to insulate ministers from taking account for their failures because life’s so much simpler if you can blame somebody else. This brings us back to NHS England.

Part of its role often seemed to be to give those of us attempting to hold government to account the runaround. If you were to ask NHS England a question, you would often be directed to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) which would often then send you back to NHS England. It’s the magic quangabout.