A quango or QUANGO is an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies. The term was originally a shortening of "quasi NGO", where NGO is the acronym for a non-government organization.
In the United Kingdom, non-departmental public body (NDPB) is a classification applied by the Cabinet Office, Treasury, the Scottish Government, and the Northern Ireland Executive to public sector organisations that have a role in the process of national government but are not part of a government department. NDPBs carry out their work largely independently from ministers and are accountable to the public through Parliament; however, ministers are responsible for the independence, effectiveness, and efficiency of non-departmental public bodies in their portfolio.
His Majesty's Treasury, occasionally referred to as the Exchequer, or more informally the Treasury, is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for developing and executing the government's public finance policy and economic policy. The Treasury maintains the Online System for Central Accounting and Reporting, the replacement for the Combined Online Information System, which itemises departmental spending under thousands of category headings, and from which the Whole of Government Accounts annual financial statements are produced.
The Government of the United Kingdom is divided into departments that each have responsibility, according to the government, for putting government policy into practice. There are currently 24 ministerial departments, 20 non-ministerial departments, and 422 agencies and other public bodies, for a total of 465 departments.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for environmental protection, food production and standards, agriculture, fisheries and rural communities in the entire United Kingdom. Concordats set out agreed frameworks for co operation, between it and the Scottish Government, Welsh Government and Northern Ireland Executive, which have devolved responsibilities for these matters in their respective nations.
The Office for National Statistics is the executive office of the UK Statistics Authority, a non-ministerial department which reports directly to the UK Parliament.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It holds the responsibility for culture and sport in England, and some aspects of the media throughout the UK, such as broadcasting. Its main offices are at 100 Parliament Street, occupying part of the building known as Government Offices Great George Street.
The Department for Transport (DfT) is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for the English transport network and a limited number of transport matters in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland that have not been devolved. The department is run by the Secretary of State for Transport, currently Louise Haigh.
Executive agencies are established by ministers as part of Scottish Government to carry out a discrete area of work. They form an integral part of the Scottish Government, but have a specific, well-defined remit. They are staffed by civil servants and headed by a Chief Executive, who is a civil servant, and are directly accountable to the government.
Public bodies of the Scottish Government are organisations that are funded by the Scottish Government. They form a tightly meshed network of executive and advisory non-departmental public bodies ("quangoes"); tribunals; and nationalised industries. Such public bodies are distinct from executive agencies of the Scottish Government, as unlike them they are not considered to be part of the Government and staff of public bodies are not civil servants, although executive agencies are listed in the Scottish Government's directory of national public bodies alongside other public bodies.
Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) was an executive agency granted trading fund status in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Transport of the United Kingdom Government.
A regulatory agency or independent agency is a government authority that is responsible for exercising autonomous dominion over some area of human activity in a licensing and regulating capacity.
Non-ministerial government departments (NMGDs) are a type of department of the United Kingdom government that deal with matters for which direct political oversight has been judged unnecessary or inappropriate. They are headed by senior civil servants. Some fulfil a regulatory or inspection function, and their status is therefore intended to protect them from political interference. Some are headed by a permanent office holder, such as a Permanent Secretary or Second Permanent Secretary.
Dame Deirdre Mary Hutton, is a British public servant, termed by the British media as "Queen of the Quangos" and "The great quango hopper". She was the chair of the UK's Civil Aviation Authority from 2009 to 2020.
The UK Statistics Authority is a non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for oversight of the Office for National Statistics, maintaining a national code of practice for official statistics, and accrediting statistics that comply with the Code as National Statistics. UKSA was established on 1 April 2008 by the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, and is directly accountable to the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
A trading fund is an executive agency, government department or often simply a part of a department, that enables the department to handle its own revenues and expenses separately from overall government finances and more like a business, as opposed to having to obtain funding from the government's legislature and feeding income back into its treasury. A Hong Kong parliamentary study of trading funds in the UK and Hong Kong describes their nature and purpose as follows:
A trading fund is a financial and accounting framework established by law to enable a government department, or part of a department, to adopt certain accounting and management practices common in the private sector. [The fund] operates on a self-financing basis and does not need to regularly seek funding from the legislature to finance its daily operations after its establishment... the intention [is that such] an institutional change would provide the appropriate flexibility in resource management and nurture a new working culture to improve services in terms of both quality and cost-effectiveness.
The UK Commission for Employment and Skills was a non-departmental public body that provided advice on skills and employment policy to the UK Government and the Devolved Administrations.
The Government of the United Kingdom is the central executive authority of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The government is led by the prime minister who selects all the other ministers. The country has had a Labour-led government since 2024. The prime minister Keir Starmer and his most senior ministers belong to the supreme decision-making committee, known as the Cabinet.
Following the 2010 United Kingdom general election, the UK Government under the Cameron–Clegg coalition announced plans to curb public spending through the abolition of a large number of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (quangos). This was styled in the national press as a "bonfire of the quangos", making reference to Girolamo Savonarola's religiously inspired Bonfire of the Vanities.
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