In October 2010, the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude announced that 192 Quasiautonomous Non-Governmental Organisations (quangos) would be abolished and a further 118 merged.
What are colloquially referred to as quangos are in fact a combination of nonministerial departments, executive agencies, non-departmental public bodies and others. They have a wide range of functions from providing expert advisory services to government to operating major parts of the National Health Service with multibillion pound budgets.
While the actual number of quangos has fallen, most of the bodies abolished have been small advisory bodies whose functions have simply been transferred to other quangos or government departments.So despite this reduction in number, quangos retain significant responsibility over areas of policy and the sum of their budgets stretches into the tens of billions of pounds.
This research note investigates who, in 2014-15, sat on quango boards, who sat on multiple boards in the same year and their attendance rate at board meetings. Where available, data on remuneration, allowances or honorariums has also been collected.