Quangos, true to type

Two of the thousand or so quangos set up by the Government to dispense cash and generally keep a control on us on behalf of the Government have been in the news.

The Arts Council England, one of the oldest, was the subject of an independent report by Baroness McIntosh. She concluded that it was too much focused on its own priorities to be able to set a lead in a "shake up " of England's cultural institutions, had an over complex structure and no overall strategy. It has lost much respect from the bodies it helps and earlier drew condemnation from its requirements about sexual orientation of bidders, among other matters. It has lost sight of its purpose to promote excellence in the arts and had become obsessed with promoting social cohesion, diversity and even social well-being.

Another element of criticism, this from the shadow arts minister Ed Vaizey, was that the council was spending £60 million annually on administration alone, and that since 1997 the number of staff had trebled to 635.

Another quango, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), came under criticism this week by Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers Alliance. This quango is charged with making the UK more innovative, has a staff of over 100 people and receives more than £300 million of lottery and departmental money.

This is an example of top-down Government micro management, which assumes that a group of unaccountable civil servants can somehow manage our society into becoming more innovative. The Government seems to have overlooked the fact that over the past 150 years most inventions have been done by lone inventors or small groups, rather than by companies. Britain has a record second to none of Nobel prizes and inventions, even if the ideas were adopted and developed in other countries rather than here. In hardly any case did a Government department or quango play an important role. Indeed anti-commercial attitudes of some politicians have hastened the loss of ideas to abroad.

NESTA has not helped by insisting that prizes may go only to not-for-profit organisations. An example was the "Big Green Challenge" prize which offered funds of £1 million for "new approaches that will lead towards a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions in their communities." The result was predictable, - few of the entrants came up with anything radically new. Rather, they produced schemes for collecting used cooking oil, for small-scale hydroelectric generation and for recycling household waste, - all used existing technologies, and no real innovation was forthcoming.

Some of the major problems with quangos are revealed in ACE and NESTA, - bureaucrats seeking their own ends and advancement and increasing staff rather than effectiveness. These are classic and well established tendencies of bureaucracy. The Government should have been more aware of the waste and diversion which were likely to occur. They should have sought advice on the best way to promote innovation, which would certainly no be by the dead hand of bureaucracy. They should have given some thought as to what they, the Government, wished to achieve and been less narrow and dogmatic in the way they approached the matters. Otherwise waste was predictable.