Governmental bodies and government growth

Abstract

The term ‘quango’ has lost all its original precision as it has come into popular usage. But widespread use has at least directed attention dramatically to an area of modern government which, though murky and hard to define, is where much of the political and administrative ‘action’ now undoubtedly takes place. The difficulty lies, of course, in gaining any intellectual bearings on this vast and apparently formless mass of organisations, collectively, and therefore uselessly, now called ‘quangos’, lying between Government Departments themselves, on the one hand, and truly private or independent bodies and companies, on the other. This essay will briefly explore three broad issues running through this developing structure of ‘semi-government’ which is loosely known as the world of ‘governmental bodies’, ‘quangos’ or ‘fringe bodies’. These issues are:

• 1. The extent to which recent government growth in Britain has taken place outside the civil service structure. As will be stressed, a funny thing happened to ‘megabureaucracy’ on its way to 1984.

• 2. The bewildering heterogeneity of types of central governmental bodies and some of the ways in which one may attempt to grasp or classify this apparently formless mass.

• 3. Some of the possible implications of an increasingly indirect and fragmented structure of central administration for the ‘delivery’ of policy in British government.