Worse than a white elephant

The TaxPayers Alliance recently published a report on the "progress" of the Regional Development Agencies. It makes sorry reading.

Many of us are concerned that the Government is thinking of giving extra responsibilities to the Agencies, even taking over some Local Authority functions, and becoming embryonic regional governments by the back door. The fact that like all quangos they are unaccountable to the local communities they are supposed to serve, unaccountable even to Parliament and therefore the tool of a small number of MPs alone, and that they are stuffed with Party members and most of these from London, should give us real concern. As unaccountable bureaucracies they have been guilty of expansion in staff and of great waste - estravagant trips abroad, huge travel expenses at home and the promotion of lavish events.

The greatest condemnation is however, according to the report, that they have failed in their main remits laid out at their outset in 1999.

1) They have failed to promote employment. The number of jobs and the number of people in work rose by 9.5% between 1995 and 2000, while in the years 2000 and 2005 it increased by 3%. Employment was growing faster when they took over than afterwards.

2) They have failed generally to promote Economic Growth. Apart from London and the South East the regions grew more rapidly in the seven years before the agencies' set-up than in the seven years afterwards. This is true whether we consider growth per head or whether we consider total output.

3) They have failed to reduce inter-regional inequality, and also equality within regions. To illustrate the first, in 1992 output from the regions apart from London and the South East was 64% of national output. By 2006 the seven other regions contributed only 52%.

We thus have a lumbering, wasteful and unaccountable set of quangos which has failed to achieve their main reasons for existing, indeed they seem to have made them worse. Of course the agencies will defend themselves with anecdotes or isolated statistics of what has happened in various places which may or may not have happened precisely and only because of the regional agency, but they have to explain the general failures outlined above. These are objective, and unmistakeable.

The cost is difficult to quantify, in terms of lost or wasted potential in at least 7 regions out of 9. What may be quantified is the taxpayer's money devoted to all this. The regional agencies since their inception have cost £15 billion, or about £600 per household. I would like our £600 back!