Time to prune back the quangos

Trevor Kavanagh’s column in The Sun today contains one of those facts that makes you stop and re-read the sentence to make sure you’ve understood it correctly. Kavanagh calculates that,

“Getting rid of half [the 200 new quangos New Labour has created] would let us abolish income tax for everyone earning under £20,000–and still leave plenty to spare.”

The budget for quangos is, shockingly, five times larger than that of the Ministry of Defence. The time is surely, ripe, for the Tories to come up with a list of quangos they would either abolish or, as Dan Lewis suggested in the Sunday Telegraph, privatise. Such a policy would both be popular and a commitment to cutting government spending that couldn’t be caricatured as a threat to schools n’ hospitals.