We will pay a heavy price for robbing agencies of independence
He had only two ministers — Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, and Pooh-Bah, the Lord High Everything Else. There are other lords in the operetta, of course — Pish-Tush and Pitti-Sing come to mind — but they don’t actually do anything. They’re just there, mainly to join in the chorus.
So why don’t we merge all the existing agencies that annoy the state from time to time into one big Pooh-Bah agency? We could let it talk a lot, allow it to sound self-important, and never have to listen to it at all. The real work would be done by the Lord High Executioner, also known as the Department of Finance.
It sounds fanciful, doesn’t it? But it seems to be exactly what the Government has in mind, if all the recent leaks are to be believed — and all the leaks are coming directly from the Government, so they must be true. First it was the Equality Authority. Then the Human Rights Commission. Then the Data Protection Commissioner. They were followed in short order by the Disability Authority. Then the Combat Poverty Agency.
What’s to be next, I wonder? The Equality Tribunal? The Ombudsman, or the Ombudsman for Children? The Freedom of Information Commissioner? The Standards in Public Office Commission? Why not roll them all into one package and be done with it? And you can add the National Consumer Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the various regulators that have been developed to keep things on the straight and narrow over the years.
Oh, and while we’re at it, couldn’t we merge the various tribunals into the lot? That would save a few bob. And the ESRI — wouldn’t that teach them to start a recession?
All these agencies have a few things in common. They are what are sometimes sneeringly referred to as ‘quangos’. The term originally meant quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations.
They were set up originally to carry out a range of functions on behalf of government and the people, but to do so in a way that was independent of politics. Quangos are usually funded by the taxpayer, and over the years it has frequently been argued that what they lack in accountability, they make up for in poor governance and weak management.
That may not actually be true — in fact in an awful lot of cases it’s very far from the truth — but it’s part of the caricature that surrounds quangos, at least when someone decides to start getting rid of them. But there are two types of quangos. There is the type that frequently irritates and annoys the system, and the type the system likes to hide behind.
Think of the HSE, the National Roads Authority, the National Treasury Management Agency. The NTMA last year managed a portfolio worth nearly €65 billion, and the other two agencies have a combined budget of not far short of €20bn this year alone.
They are huge organisations in terms of what they spend, and of course the HSE is a huge employer as well. All three carry out vital functions for the state — and most people would agree that there are issues of accountability surrounding their activities. That’s not meant as a criticism, just a statement of fact that derives from the way they were set up. All three were established to do a job — and to get on with it.
But all three serve another function as well. If anything goes wrong in health or in the management of the roads programme, it is the executive agency that takes the flak, not the relevant minister. Ministers routinely hide behind the work of these massive quangos, and of course they turn up to anything that constitutes good news. When was the last time you remember the chair of the NRA, or its chief executive, opening a new stretch of motorway or a new bypass?
When there is good news, the quangos are there to serve the publicity needs of the Government. But when there is bad news, they’re on their own.
These are the quangos that governments like to hide behind. And as the years have rolled by, we have seen, and will see, more of them. Government by executive agency may not be accountable government, but it will always be argued that it’s the best way to get things done.
But the other quangos — the ones I mentioned above — are different. Their purpose is essentially to prod the government. Unlike the big guys, they cost very little to run — The National Disability Authority, for example, has a budget of about €6.5 million (about half what the Department of Health spends on legal fees). They all report to ministers and through them (allegedly, anyway) to the Oireachtas.
But the purpose of the Combat Poverty Agency, the Disability Authority, and the rest is not to carry out the bidding of the State, but to help inform and shape policy, to represent people in their battles with the state, to ensure a more open and inclusive society.
They act sometimes as the conscience of the state, and sometimes as the agencies that point out the need for new directions. Sometimes they can be seen as critical of state practices. And unlike the big executive agencies, they are supposed to be independent in how they carry out their functions, even though sometimes the governance arrangements put in place can effectively dilute that independence.
But now we’re to have a public debate about the need for all these quangos. We’re in tough times, and money has to be saved. What better way of saving it than a cull of quangos? We’ll be told about overlapping functions, duplication of resources, economies of scale.
What we won’t be told is that the quangos that are for the chop are those that annoy and irritate the government. There won’t be any huge debate about the need to roll the National Roads Authority and the Road Safety Authority together, or to combine Bord Pleanala with the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, all the focus will be on the bodies whose function it is to enhance the position of citizens, sometimes embattled and vulnerable citizens. I’m not arguing here that there isn’t a case for some rationalisation. I’d like to see some of the agencies like the Equality Authority and the Disability Authority become stronger and more effective, and that might well be achieved (while saving some resources as well) by bringing them together.
But if the real purpose of bringing them together is to rob them of their independence, and stop them being quite so annoying, then we will pay a heavy price for every penny we save. Such independence as they have, and their ability to point out defects and deficiencies in the way people are treated, needs to be enhanced, not weakened. In a real sense, the abolition of the Combat Poverty Agency, or the weakening of the Human Rights Commission or any of the Ombudsman’s offices, would be a step towards undermining our democracy. It certainly wouldn’t be worth the few miserable euro that might be saved.
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