Big business

Despite Gordon Brown's 1995 call for a "bonfire of quangos", these "creatures" continue to grow, and now collectively are one of Central Government's largest avenues of expenditure and employment.

It seems, according to figures calculated by the Taxpayers Alliance - necessary because the Cabinet office significantly stopped publishing the figure last year, that there are now 1,162 of such bodies, with 700,000 staff. They cost Government £101 billion, or us about £2,550 per household.

The proliferation is of great concern:

- many of their responsibilities overlap, producing wasteful duplication and the need to liaise, and they cut across local authority functions.

- they conceal from the public and even from Government what is happening. In some cases they are becoming almost regional government,- something rejected by the electorate.

- they are unaccountable and yet exercise great power over the lives of ordinary citizens. Their sizes vary, from the Job Centre Plus with 70,000 staff and costing £3.5 billion a year, to many with staff numbers in single figures, but they penetrate many areas of daily life.

They may be answerable to ministers, who set their policies and monitor them as far as possible, but the sheer number means that many do not have much scrutiny, and collectively they spend vast sums of taxpayers money.