Sufficient Justification

The House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee has said that coalition government plans to scrap up to 192 quangos and merge another 118 will not save money or improve accountability.

They may well be right.

On the other hand, if a quango serves no useful purpose or does something that can be done by a government department, that is sufficient reason in itself to get rid of it.
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Useless Bodies

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In what has been called the ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’ the axe has fallen on 192 of these often useless bodies. Another 118 will be merged and 171 ‘substantially’ reformed.

There is much discussion in the papers this morning as to whether or not the cuts, which could result in as many as 10,000 people being put out of work, will actually save the billion pounds annually that the government have forecast.

Maybe there are few savings in the short-term when redundancy and severance costs are taken into account. But isn’t the whole point of getting rid of these quangos is to remove the interference that some unaccountable officials have in our lives?

And, while it is a shame that people will be made redundant because of the cuts, the Cabinet Office Minister is right to say that this move will end the ‘spectacle of unelected quangocrats making decisions that affect millions of lives without scrutiny’.
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A Great Shame

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Since 1801, with the exception of the war year of 1941, Britain has carried out a National Census every decade until 2001. Past census returns up to 1911 are easily available online (with the exception of Scotland who don’t publish that year until March of next year).

Now the census is to be scrapped under plans announced by the Cabinet Office Minister who says that it is an expensive and inaccurate way of measuring the number of people in Britain. Reports suggest that the Cabinet will approve the plan and that the next census, in March of next year, will be the last one conducted.

It may well be that, as the minister says, there are different and cheaper ways of counting the population of Britain using existing public and private databases. However, a tremendous reference source used by a variety of bodies and private individuals will be lost for ever.

I, for example, have so far been able to track my father’s family back as far as 1851 using the published census returns. I’m still working on this project to see if I can get further back in time and also waiting to see what the family position was in 1911.

So I believe it will be a very great shame if future generations will not be able to research the census returns after 2011.
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A ‘Bung’?

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Unite, the largest union in Britain has donated almost £30 millions to the Labour Party over the past decade, leading to claims that it has the party in its pocket.

I don’t know whether this claim is true or not, though I have my own views on the subject, but a report in the Daily Telegraph this morning reveals that the union has, in turn, received £18 millions of taxpayers' money since 1998 under Labour.

It appears that the government controls two little-known funds, the Union Modernisation Fund and the Union Learning Fund, set up to improve training and skills for union members. Unite, it seems, was the biggest beneficiary from the first of these funds and received a sixth of all the money given out from the second.

The Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, said: ‘This really looks like money laundering - taxpayers’ money is being funnelled into Unite then put straight back into Labour's coffers.’ Opposition parties claim that the funds are a ‘bung’ to groups that support Labour politically and financially. It certainly seems that way.

Unite is the same union that by threatening to strike has already cost British Airways an estimated £25 millions and may cost them a great deal more if the strikes go ahead!
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