If Starmer promised change, why are ministers still powerless against Britain’s quangocracy

28 April 2025, 15:11

It’s no secret that Sir Keir Starmer and his top team aren’t happy with the way the British state runs itself.

They came to power with a whopping majority and a promise of change - however nebulous that promise was - and yet there is a strong sense that much of their first 10 months or so in office has been wasted.

Why is that? Many put it down to poor preparation in opposition, a weak frontbench and the failure to spell out their plans to the public, limiting their room to manoeuvre.

All those criticisms have some merit, but a bigger, more structural problem they are facing is that when ministers pull levers, nothing much happens.

This is not a problem unique to Labour - it was a complaint of Conservative ministers as well.

The core reason is because far from ministers being the masters of their policy areas, able to shape policy and delivery according to their democratic mandate, the real power is now held by a sprawling web of quangos.

Starmer and his wider team have recognised this.

Nowhere is it clearer than in the Department for Health and Social Care, where Wes Streeting has recognised that his plans to reform the NHS will only work once true control of the NHS rests with him and his officials, and not with NHS England which he is in the middle of abolishing.

Nowhere is the scale of the quangocracy more in evidence than in the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s quango rich list, published this week.

It reveals that across hundreds of these bodies - from the DVLA to the OBR to almost every other conceivable collection of letters - there are 1,472 people with six figure pay deals, meaning salary plus other benefits such as pension contributions.

Looking at salaries alone, there are 315 on more than the prime minister. This is symbolically significant; nowhere is his lack of power relative to his democratic mandate more in evidence.

Of course, ultimate power still resides with the government and with parliament. Through legislation, the government can scrap pretty much any of these bodies.

But excluding the nuclear option, day-to-day control over this vast budget and this sprawling network of bodies is incredibly limited.

So the next time you want to access a service and you find that it isn’t working, it’s worth asking: is this something that ministers have the power to change themselves, or are they just as frustrated as you?

Callum McGoldrick is a researcher at the TaxPayers' Alliance

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