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The Invitation Given Mark’s well known and vocal views on MPs, he was surprised to receive an email inviting him to give evidence to the House of Commons Public Administration Committee on patronage in political life. Was it a joke? Could someone be winding him up? After all, chasing politicians down the road with camera crews in tow hasn’t exactly endeared him to them... But it turned out to be serious, and so Mark decided to submit a report to the committee on the vast, under-examined area of public bodies, quangos - or Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations to give them their full name. 
Quangos In October 1996 Tony Blair told the Labour party conference that when he came to power he’d put the “the quango state in history’s dustbin where it belongs”. Six years later it’s as bloated as ever. There are around 1,000 quangos with 30,000 members, spending millions of pounds of public money while exercising huge influence over government policy. What’s more, these bodies - whose members are appointed by government ministers - are largely comprised of the same kinds of people: a political class made up of Lords, Ladies, captains of industry, OBEs, barristers, professors (with the odd lollipop lady thrown in for good measure). Some of these public bodies seem trivial – there is a Place Names Committee, a committee that decides what wine will be served at government functions, a Work - Life Balance Committee which had no job description. There is also an Apple and Pears Council, which hasn’t been set up for the preservation of cockney rhyming slang but instead, quite literally, looks at apples and pears. But the majority of these committees are very powerful indeed. They advise government on all manner of things from human cloning to genetically modified crops to business mergers to funding research for diseases. The people who serve on these committees are not elected and many have much more power to direct government thinking than backbench MPs. So where is the accountability?
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