Shortly before the last General Election, the TaxPayers’ Alliance produced a manifesto. Here is the latest in our series of posts looking at how the Coalition Government has performed in relation to our recommendations.
The full TaxPayers' Alliance manifesto can be found here.
Click here to see the full series of posts.
In our 2010 Manifesto we recommended that Select Committees should have control over quango budgets, and appointments. There is simply not enough accountability for how these organisations spend taxpayers’ money.
Quango bosses should have to appear before their respective Select Committee every single year to outline how much money they want, and what they intend to do with it. This would give elected politicians the opportunity to stand up for taxpayers and, hopefully, limit how much taxpayers’ cash is wasted.
Other ideas are to establish real and genuine sunset clauses, where organisations fold after achieving a certain objective. This would prevent mission creep – once a quango is open for business, they will invariably find new things to do outside of their original remit to stay open.
We have awarded the Government 1/5 because there have been encouraging noises but no real action on this.