Successive governments have promised to contain the blob yet 15 arm’s-length bodies have been created in the last two years. Byron Evans writes why his team is now endeavouring to map Britain’s quangos

Bonfire Night has come and gone, yet the bonfire of the quangos remains unlit. Prior to taking the top job, Andy Burnham criticised the “unaccountable state”, and Kemi Badenoch has called quangos “unaccountable” too. On Starmer’s accession to the premiership, there was a big song and dance about cutting red tape and reducing the number of arm’s-length bodies (ALBs), with the abolition of NHS England a marquee announcement.

Despite this, since 2024, the government has set up at least 15 ALBs, including the Independent Football Regulator, Great British Energy and Skills England – with several more in the pipeline. In reality, governments of all parties have come to grief, on coming to power, for lacking a detailed and actionable roadmap for curtailing the quangocracy’s influence on government decisions and power.

This is precisely why Policy Exchange’s Mapping the Quangos, the first in a series reviewing every department’s ALBs, applies a three-part test to each body: is state activity required at all, does the function need genuine independence from ministers and is an ALB the most efficient way to deliver it?

This first instalment covers the ALBs sponsored by the Department for Education (DfE) and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) – which forms part of Policy Exchange’s Project 2029, a programme aiming to establish a game plan for the first 100 days after the next General Election that could be implemented by a government of any party genuinely committed to rewiring the state.

Mapping the quangos

ALBs are built around narrow remits, so they have little obligation to weigh the wider costs of their decisions. One result is an addition to the cost to the economy, especially with regards to building homes and infrastructure. Natural England’s nutrient neutrality advice has been estimated to have delayed at least 100,000 homes. Mitigation measures to satisfy environmental requirements have included a £100m bat tunnel on HS2 and £700m of fish-deterrent equipment at Hinkley Point C. The Financial Conduct Authority’s planned diversity rules were forecast to cost businesses over £300m a year. Kemi Badenoch, then business secretary, wrote to object, but the FCA pressed on, only dropping the plans in March 2025, just shy of a year later.

There is a significant democratic problem with the current framework too. Defending the abolition of NHS England, Wes Streeting argued that there is “a reason we have politicians rather than experts as secretaries of state”. Elected politicians can be held accountable via the ballot box; there is no such mechanism for the senior leadership of ALBs, who cannot be voted out.

The Sentencing Council exemplifies this arrangement. In March 2025, it issued guidance creating a presumption in favour of pre-sentence reports for offenders from minority ethnic, cultural or religious backgrounds. Shabana Mahmood, then justice secretary, objected publicly and wrote to the Council twice. It refused to move. Only when she tabled legislation did it withdraw the guidance, and the subsequent Act included a ministerial veto. An unelected body can change policy by guidance; an elected government requires primary legislation to override it.

The ever-growing blob

Meanwhile, the ALB network continues to march on ad nauseam. The powers that be can barely agree how many there are: the Cabinet Office counts 307, the National Audit Office describes over 400 public bodies and a parliamentary committee has suggested around 500. This complex web of regulators, commissions, agencies and committees appears too large and complicated a beast to confront.

Across six of the largest ALBs covered in the report, headcount rose by a third in the decade between 2014-15 and 2024-25, from roughly 17,300 to 23,000. Each one of these employed more staff at the end of the decade than at the beginning. Combined operating expenditure rose by a quarter in real terms.

For the DfE, which sponsors 13 organisations, the report recommends abolishing the Children’s Commissioner and the School Teachers’ Review Body among others, while retaining Ofsted and Ofqual. Within Defra, it would break up the Environment Agency (13,000+ staff) and Natural England: returning policymaking to the department, enforcement to a tightly constrained regulator and consolidating research and funding into a single agency. It also proposes 10-year sunset clauses for new ALBs and an end to ALBs sponsoring other ALBs.

The power of the bureaucratic state continues to expand regardless of the colour of the government, bringing more intervention in the public’s daily lives and a proliferating bill for the taxpayer. A new government, of any party, must have an immediate and directly actionable plan to rigorously reduce the reach of the quangocracy and return power to politicians the public can hold to account. This report provides a beginning to that plan.

Byron Evans is a research fellow at Policy Exchange