Political commentary
Quango man fights back
Ferdinand Mount
'Quakers,' Malcolm Muggeridge used to say, 'minister to the minor vices.' He meant chocolates and cocoa, but he could have included Quangos too. For those highminded Frys and Rowntrees have always had an irresistible urge to set up boards and committees for doing good to the working classes. From Beveridge to Benn, the shape of welfare in this country has been Quakerish.
And it is delightfully appropriate that the first full-scale defence of the endangered species Quango should come from the Outer Circle Policy Unit which is funded by the Rowntree Trust and now run by Mr Mark Bonham-Carter, formerly chairman of the Race Relations Board and himself a kind of honorary Quaker. Naturally, the OCPU people (C not G, please, they are kindly folk) do not call the report a defence; on the contrary, they adopt the standard tactic of calling it What's Wrong With Quangos (OCPU, 4 Cambridge Terrace, Regents Park, NW1 £2.00). But from the first page you are aware that the real purpose is to tell you What's Right with Quangos.
'The impression has been generated that quangos are a bad thing.. the value of quangos as instruments of government is in danger of being ignored. The present Government is using the popular misunderstanding of quangos as an excuse for abolishing those to which it is politically opposed. It would be more appropriate to investigate ways of improving quangos. . Note the key phrases: popular misunderstanding. . .politically opposed. . .investigate. . improving, OCPU is superior to politics and to popular misunderstandings; it occupies a realm of pure social science where phenomena are investigated and institutions — and a fortiori people — are improved, which usually means expanded, thus offering more employment for the friends of OCPU.
The squeals of the Great and Good do suggest that the Tories' first three months have not been entirely wasted. One does not wish to exult in an unseemly fashion, still less to gloat. But it is hard to repress a certain Schadenfreude when you hear Lord Balogh and Lord Kearton complaining about the scandalous action of Mr David Howell in reducing the powers of the British National Oil Corporation. Lord Kearton accused the oil companies of telling 'outrageous lies' about his beloved BNOC as an excuse for not drilling more holes in the North Sea, when the real reason was that the costs of further exploration were too high. At the same time, he boasted that 'an organisation like ourselves can make rings around the oil companies'. Here is a typical quango-man's contradiction. On the one hand, our appointment has not had the desired result, viz, more oil faster; on the other hand, we ourselves arc brilliant and highly efficient; ergo, it is the villainy of the oil companies which is to blame. But if you are so brilliant, why have you not made the oil companies jump to your bidding? Well, our terms of reference did not allow us to do everything we would have liked.
It is in the nature of most quasiautonomous non-governmental organisations to yearn to become less quasiautonomous and less non-governmental, that is, to desire that completion of their powers which a perfected union with government would bring. The Price Commission has lived all its sad life with a sense of frustration, never empowered to realise by edict and ukase the full majesty of its conclusions on Portable Electric Tools or Prices, Costs and Margins in the Manufacture of Floor and Furniture Polishes. As it lingers on under a caretaker commissioner until Parliament applies the humane killer in the autumn, we are told that the Commission too has suffered from 'popular misunderstanding'. Since being rejigged in 1977, it has basically been a commission for Removing Market Imperfections — and as such should have been perfectly acceptable to John Nott and all good libertarians.
This rationalisation strikes me as somewhat tardy. In the heyday of its pretensions, the Commission was doing a good deal more than swipe at monopolies and probe market-rigging practices. Under Mr Charles Williams, as in its previous incarnation under Sir Arthur, now Lord, Cockfield — what's he doing in this Tory government? — it never stopped telling undeniably competitive companies that they were making too much money and that their prices ought to be frozen or reduced.
In none of its guises —and there have been at least three of them since 1965 — has the statutory control of prices begun to have anything like the effect of Mr Heath's abolition of resale price maintenance. Even if the Price Commission can claim any beneficial effect on competition, the benefit must be outweighed by the extra form-filling demanded of all firms, not just those which have come under the Commission's detailed scrutiny.
The onus of proof must be on the quango to prove a net benefit to the community from its activities. This point entirely escapes OCPU which seems to think that the government would be justified in setting up or carrying on with an external body if it can prove any benefit at all. No quasi-public body operates without cost. The most vivid and immediate costs are the fees of its committee members and the salaries of its staff, but the more important costs are those which it imposes upon private firms and individuals: the waste of time involved in answering the quango's questionnaires, the waste of money involved in framing new plans to fit in with the quango's stipulations, the quango's insistence on the provision of certain goods and services which are either less attractive to the customer or more expensive than those goods and services which they would otherwise provide.
The smart word to describe what the Tories are doing now is 'privatisation' — a word which is also now in fashion in social history to describe a supposed weakening of the public dimension in society in favour of a withdrawal into family life. Social history is where the word should stay, because privatising nationalised industries is designed to distribute benefits to the general publk as consumer, while 'public ownership' only protects the private sectional interests of the producers. In fact Mr Nicholas Goodison, the chairman of the Stock Exchange, skittishly suggests that privatisation really ought to be renamed 'public ownership'. Myself, I prefer 'backdoor den ational isation'.
Naturally the producers will fight back. And not the least pleasing spectacle of late has been the hysterical protest of the Socialist Medical Association against the decision of the electricians' union to accept BUPA membership as part of a new pay deal. Already the decision has been attacked by the health service unions, which showed such conspicuous devotion to the sick last winter. Now socialist doctors — true, a smallish band — express their horror that bluecollar workers should wish to join the leeches and parasites in the London Clinic. BUPA claims that 200,000 trade unionists are already members of their private health scheme. A BUPA opinion poll of 8,000 trade unionists showed that 80 per cent wanted to have the freedom to choose independent medicine. Yet when this column ventured to suggest that there was a suppressed demand for free choice in health, and that the forthcoming report of the Royal Commission on the National Health Service was unlikely to take much account of this or of alternative methods of financing the NHS (which it didn't), Sir Alec Merrison, the Commission's chairman, got rather cross.
It is a long haul the Tories have started on, and there are a considerable number of interested persons hauling in the opposite direction. There is an unacknowledged coalition between quango man and the bureaucracy proper. Both stand to gain from a continued concentration of power in the hands of the state. Both lose if Frank Chapple lets his electricians make their own arrangements for medical care. After all, the next thing you know, they will be asking to see the senior consultant and making a fuss, just like the middle classes.
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