Published: Daily Telegraph Letters, 25 September 2010
Sir,
Before this paper and its readership cheer too loudly at the "bonfire of the quangos" (report, September 24), it is worth pausing to think about who is now going to run some of their continuing functions.
While there is always satisfaction for politicians in being able to claim that they have abolished any kind of outside body - especially if it saves money - the alternative is sometimes worse than the disease. For instance, do we really want those with expertise in a specific area to find that they have been replaced by a generalist civil servant, on the merry-goround of moving jobs to get promoted, who has absolutely no idea about the subject and very often cares less?
Our current Civil Service structure does not reward people for gaining expertise, or for rising through the ranks in a particular specialist job. It rewards people for being prepared to move around in order to fill jobs that other people have just vacated.
So, we have the centralisation of currently decentralised functions on the one hand (more London-centred decision-making) and, as it would appear at the moment, a triumph of Whitehall over the Next Step agencies set up by ... guess who? Yes, Margaret Thatcher.
Rejoice if you must, but do so with some discrimination, because we may find that not only are appointments politicised in a way that the Nolan Committee condemned a decade ago, but that those with genuine knowledge are no longer involved in the process.
That is unless, of course, they're going to change radically the nature of the Civil Service by bringing those with such expertise into the core of decisionmaking. I hear no such policy or change being debated by the Coalition.
Rt Hon DAVID BLUNKETT MP (Lab, Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough)
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