The coalition government underestimated the opposition its “bonfire of the quangos” drive would encounter among members of the House of Lords, Francis Maude has told MPs.
Former Cabinet Office minister Lord Maude’s comments came at a session of parliament’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee yesterday morning.
MPs are examining the UK’s landscape of public bodies against the back drop of prime minister Keir Starmer’s March 2025 pledge to take on the UK’s “vast array” of arm’s length bodies, which he dubbed a “cottage industry of checkers and blockers”.
Maude was asked directly what challenges he expected the Starmer administration to face in its drive.
“There are typically four reasons why reform programmes fail or get pushed off track,” Maude replied. “One is political pushback. The second is vested-interest resistance. The third is inertia and the fourth is lack of technical capability. No plan, as we know, survives first contact with reality. You come across the first unforeseen difficulty and you need then to have the technical capability to work out what’s the answer.”
Maude said the current government should expect to encounter “some combination of all those factors”.
He said that one of the main mistakes the coalition government made with its reform programme involved the legislation introduced to enable it to happen.
“Your head swam with the idea of trying to get all of these things through primary legislation,” he said. “So we created the Public Bodies Bill, which gave us some Henry VIII-ish powers to change primary legislation by secondary legislation.
“The mistake we made – or that the business managers made – was to think that this would be relatively uncontroversial, and so we introduced it in the House of Lords.”
Maude said this turned out not to be the case.
“It was not at all uncontroversial in the House of Lords,” he said. “If I try and recollect that time, the number of eminent folk in the House of Lords who would say ‘Well, of course Francis I totally agree with what you’re doing in principle, but you can’t possibly mean it to apply to this particular public body, of which I happen to be chairman...’ That was an important bit of learning for the future.”
The coalition government’s Bonfire of the Quangos led to the scrapping of around 290 public bodies, believed to be around one-third of the UK’s overall landscape of such organisations at the time.
Among the organisations confined to the history books were the Central Office of Information, the National School of Government, the Audit Commission, and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.
Maude told yesterday’s session that at the time – more than a decade ago – he saw the reduction as being just the start. “That was the first cut, as it were,” he said. “But that should have continued. The rule does apply: if you’re not trying to make the number smaller, it will get bigger. So you need to do this continually. That was what the triennial review programme was meant to deliver. It has to be done; it has to be done rigorously.”
The biggest element of Starmer’s cull of arm’s length bodies so-far announced is the abolition of NHS England and the return of its functions to the Department of Health and Social Care.
Maude described scrapping NHS England – which was created by the coalition government of which he was a member – as “a good decision”.
According to a staff update at the end of January, enabling legislation will be required for the “new DHSC” to come into effect in April next year, in line with ministers’ current expectations.
'Woeful lack of consistency’ on oversight
Elsewhere in yesterday’s session Maude was asked how seriously he believes government departments and their staff take oversight of the ALBs for which they are responsible.
Maude said there was “huge variation” across government but that generally the answer was “not seriously enough”.
“Oversight is too often, in my experience, delegated to too junior a level,” he said. “It’s not very interesting and not very exciting. And people get drawn to where there are things going on that stimulate adrenaline. And this, by and large, doesn’t.”
However he said oversight of ALBs is really important and has “real consequences”.
Maude said he had addressed the issue in his Independent Review of Governance and Accountability in the Civil Service, which was published in 2023.
“One of the recommendations I made was that there should be oversight at a more senior level, it should be taken more seriously and done more consistently – there's a woeful lack of consistency,” he said.