Posts tagged with ‘ Arm’s length bodies ’

If the Government’s listening exercise can encourage ministers to clarify the lines of accountability, the decentralisation introduced in the Health and Social Care Bill may be more widely accepted. The Institute’s recent report, Nothing to do with me? put forward guiding principles on ministerial accountability within decentralised services.

In July 2010, Environment Secretary announced the abolition of the government funded watchdog on sustainability, the Sustainable Development Commission.

We’ve produced our report, Read Before Burning. We had in the autumn the results of the Government review. Today, we heard coruscating criticism from the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) of the way the government carried out its review.

There is often Parliamentary controversy when the government seeks to give itself ‘Henry VIII powers’ – extensive powers through secondary legislation.

Early on in my civil service career, I worked on the abolition of the Greater London Council (GLC). One of the Thatcher government’s charges against the GLC was that it wasted ratepayers’ money on a plethora of loony left causes.

Ministers have already said that the list does not represent current policy. But the desire to rein back the quango state was already clear in the coalition agreement and earlier announcements.

Everyone agrees the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) needs not only to be independent, but also be seen to be independent of government. Otherwise it fails the credibility test. The Treasury Select Committee has therefore concluded the only way of giving it that degree of independence is to make it a non-Ministerial department.

The latest government cull of Arm’s length bodies (ALBs)  may be different in scale and speed from anything we have seen in the recent past – but there are many useful lessons out there on how to navigate through the minefield.  In particular it pays to learn from those who have already been through...

Welcome to the confused subject of arm’s length government. At the launch of the Institute last year, Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell singled out the tangled landscape of arm’s length government as a suitable case for ‘IFG treatment’.