Quangos and ministerial patronage

As the state of government finances becomes more precarious, with the structural deficit becoming more and more unsustainable and the burgeoning public debt running out of control, the government has been incurring even more expenditure with the creation of new regulatory and other authorities of every sort.

Some of these regulatory authorities are meant to ensure compliance and conformity with EU specifications - but various others have been here for some time and have been proliferating.

The growth of public bodies, acting in effect as executive agents of government, is an important element in corporatism and one that merits close attention.

What do we mean by the term "public body"? The term covers a multitude of different organisations with different relations with the central government or Parliament.

The principal criterion to be applied in determining where, along the spectrum, a particular body fits, is its degree of independence. This was the origin of the use of the acronym quango, which was invented in the USA in the late 1960s to describe the growth of 'not-for-profit' corporations which were normally non-governmental in character but were, in fact, dependent for contracts on government agencies and were sometimes brought into existence by them.

Applied thus to many foundations, corporations and authorities, quango stands for quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations. The first remarkable thing about public bodies is that nobody knows how many there are. The second remarkable thing is that no-one has yet undertaken a meticulous exercise to establish the total annual amount of public funds administered by these bodies.

The area so 'administered' is vast and extends from Tomorrow's Schools to Waste Management, from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority to the Malta Resources Authority, from the Tourism Authority to the Public Transport Authority, from Heritage Malta to the Malta Centre for Restoration.

A quango is, by its nature, inclined to be undemocratic because it lives in no-man's land, beyond the formal premises of a government department. In theory it is supervised by Parliament but, in practice, it often carries on absorbing substantial sums of public money without most people knowing it even exists.

It is an axiom of our parliamentary system of government that MPs decide how public funds are to be raised and spent. MPs are elected by voters and the people in charge of spending are either ministers or civil servants.

Ministers are MPs and directly answerable to parliament. Civil servants abide by conditions of service governed by strict rules that come under parliamentary scrutiny.

Quangos are run, and often staffed, by an entirely different category of person. The quangocrat is not elected by anyone. He is not required by law to have any qualifications.

Quangoland is a totally undemocratic system of outdoor relief for the great, the good and the well-befriended. A good many who serve in quangos may well deserve to be there. It is equally beyond question that many others are unworthy beneficiaries of a rampant and unsupervised system which often provides powerful and well-paid jobs for the boys (and girls) who are in the favour of ministers.

Certain categories of people get their snouts stuck in the quango trough, depending on which government is in office.

One of the quango's most notable characteristics is its immortality: quangos never grow old; rather, they multiply or take on new forms. Committees evolve into commissions or boards, eventually materialising into fully-fledged authorities.

There is the old-established monster "vested interests", too much in evidence in this field. Both the potential beneficiaries of new boards, and the bureaucrats to be employed by them, have an interest in their creation.

Professor Hayek once described these public bodies as "the political machinery of para-government". In his book Quango, Quango, Quango, published by the Adam Smith Institute, Philip Holland claims that "the vast and complex network of quangos encourages an abuse of patronage and invites corruption".

With public bodies growing in power and importance, ministers have succumbed to the temptation of making unashamedly political appointments.

The political expansion of executive power that could arise when governments can etablish public bodies, dictate their terms of reference, supervise their activities and select their members, is all too obvious.

If politicians are genuinely concerned about the growing power of the state at the expense of the citizen, then tackling the mushrooming empire of public bodies must become a high priority.

We must first slim the number, size and costs of quangos. Secondly, all bodies receiving more than half their income from public funds should be made directly and openly accountable to Parliament. We are now beginning to see the emergence of large, powerful quangos spending several millions of liri, appointed by ministers, yet not answerable to MPs.

In this context, it must be emphasised that accountability to ministers is not accountability to Parliament, particularly when ministers may not regard themselves as answerable to Parliament for a full range of a body's activities.

Coming to the central issue of patronage, I believe that the appointments system has been severely abused in recent years and that this abuse has contributed to the declining respect in which the public service deserves to be held.

Ministers must be made, in some way, more accountable to Parliament for individual nominations and for the attendance record of each nominee. Shouldn't nominations to the more important public bodies be subitted to the scrutiny of a Select Committee of Parliament to ensure that qualifications prevail over blatant favouritism?

There is an urgent need for a thorough analysis of this topic which has to do with Malta's democratic development and the proper management of its financial resources.

The first step is to assess the magnitude of the problem and to establish the number of public bodies that are now in operation, the magnitude of the economic segment for which they are responsible, and the degree of political patronage that is exercised by ministers without Parliamantary control.