Policy analysis

LGOF: CPA-lite or Daily Mail target practice?  

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Jason Lowther

In July, then Local Government Minister Jim McMahon announced a new Local Government Outcomes Framework (LGOF), which (he said) “forms an integral part of this Government’s reforms to ensure we have a sector which is fit, legal and decent”.  These reforms are already pretty extensive, including LG reorganisation, devolution, community engagement, member standards and funding arrangements.

The LGOF framework, the Minister hoped, “will help to put the right checks and balances in place to ensure value for the taxpayer and results for citizens to whom councils are ultimately responsible”.  Given the removal of most systematic monitoring of local performance and outcomes in England with the demise of the Audit Commission a decade ago, is this a new dawn for helpful local insights and intelligent central steering, or the raw material for a crude league table that obscures more than it illuminates?

History shows the difficulty of designing and using performance measures effectively.  Whilst the logic of measuring what matters to inform management (and political) decision making is clear, and there are many examples of successful applications, there are enough examples of failures and unintended negative consequences to encourage caution. 

The immediate precursor to LGOF was a set of measures developed by the ill-fated Office of Local Government (OFLOG).  These were immediately manipulated by the Times newspaper into a league table, labelling Nottingham as the worst council.  The fact that this took place during the pre-election period only made the impact more negative, leading to a stinging letter from the LGA to the then Secretary of State, Michael Gove.  OFLOG was in some ways set up to fail.  Sited inside the Ministry, its political independence was immediately open to challenge.  And reconciling providing local authorities with better data at the same time as acting as an accountability mechanism to central government was always going to be tricky. 

The health service experience of performance measures and targets presents mixed evidence.  It appears that four-hour A&E waiting times targets were associated with reduced mortality, but at the same time there were examples of departments admitting patients near to the time limit at the expense of others more in need of urgent care, a few examples of blatant misrepresentation of figures, and some bizarre holding of patients in ambulances and redefinition of corridors as wards.

Key lessons from these examples include the importance of having a clear focus for the LGOF and the adoption of a broad ‘exploratory’ approach to presenting the performance measures.   As the Institute for Government argued for OFLOG, a key contribution could be making data more consistently available, comparable and usable – and hence supporting evidence-based policy making through the deliberative use of robust evidence.

The LGOF data needs to be presented in ways that enable and encourage exploration and questioning, rather than simplistic league tables which ignore the inherent differences between different councils in terms of population, geography, deprivation, funding, etc.  It therefore needs exhibit what I call the three Cs: to be comparable across councils, contextualised to reflect local circumstances, and citizen-focussed (accessible to lay people).

There are many positive features of the new framework, including its attempt to look at missions and outcomes (rather than just council outputs).  Interested parties had until 12 September 2025 to respond to the Government’s consultation, so we now await the government’s response to that.  Councils can easily see how the proposed LGOF measures look for them using the excellent new LG Inform LGOF report. 

Dr Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham.  This article was initially published in the Local Area Research and Intelligence Association (LARIA) newsletter. Email [email protected]

Cyclopean ‘local’ government and the end of local democracy?

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Chris Game

As with another quite recent blog of mine, it’s important to start with the alert that most of its style, structure and content stem directly from its having been written in the first instance not for an academic readership, but as a column for probably this week’s Birmingham Post. There are a few additions and subtractions, plus, barring a dramatically uncharacteristic Lowtherian intervention, one guaranteeable difference: the title.

At the time of writing this intro I don’t know for certain what the Post editor’s choice of words and punctuation will be – except that it won’t comprise nine words, including three longish ones. Space and layout, you understand. It will, however – because regular authors do have at least some bargaining ‘say’ – open with that key word that many/most Post readers will barely recognise.

To summarise the whole thing: here in Britain we already have, and in England, following last December’s devolution White Paper, are about to develop still further, a scale of ‘local’ government that makes a complete mockery of the term ‘local’; and the present Government, with no noticeable public consultation, is embarked on increasing that non-local size still further – to truly Cyclopean dimensions.

And, as I sought to explain to the Post editor, by introducing this concept, rarely if ever used in modern political debate, both the Post and I will become – well, you never know – possibly a little bit famous. Here’s the reasoning.

First, ‘Cyclopean’, used in the context of local government.  Ancient Greek, pretty obviously, it originally described an architectural style in which the walls, towers and other fortifications of ancient cities like Mycenae (a 70-odd mile day trip SW of Athens) were constructed from massive limestone boulders – of the scale shown in the accompanying illustration – fitted extremely closely together without apparently having been substantially reshaped and without use of mortar or cement. 

So preternaturally impressive were these city constructions – the hilltop Mycenae was perhaps the most famous, but there were numerous others – that the myth developed that they must have been built by the Cyclopes, a race of superhuman giants in Greek mythology, and the only humans physically capable of creating such constructions. Hence ‘Cyclopean’ – to describe the assumed method and scale of a city’s governmental architecture, not the size of its residential population.

Somehow, though, towards the latter end of the 3,500 intervening years, the UK has developed, to an almost unique degree, its own interpretation of ‘Cyclopean local government’. Yes, there are loads of large buildings – Birmingham’s Council House and Central Library for starters, the Octagon, etc. – but there’s no Cyclopean mystery about what holds them together. Put crudely, it’s the concrete and steel, not some mystical manpower.

The UK’s, and particularly England’s, modern-day local government and its latest structural ‘reform’ have become almost entirely about scale. Instead of referring to the governance of, or provision of services for, a particular local community and its unique character, England’s ‘Cyclopean local government’ currently comprises just over 300 ‘local’ authorities, with populations averaging 180,000 – which is hardly our (or anyone’s) ‘everyday’ usage and understanding of that term ‘local’.

And yes, averaging. Which, of course, would make Birmingham’s 1.2 million population ‘super-Cyclopean’ – and the West Midlands Combined Authority’s 4 million ‘Mega-Cyclopean’. Or ‘hyper-Cyclopean’, which I personally slightly prefer, suggesting something beyond the bounds of reason, or control. We’ll return to that.

Some quick comparisons or contrasts: average size of German and Italian municipalities is around 7,500, Spain’s 5,700, and France, albeit as exceptional in its way as the UK, 1,900. Yes, slightly under one-hundredth the size of our average, and, by chance, roughly the same as our smallest, the Isles of Scilly, arguably our one ‘municipality’ that wouldn’t make a mockery of the term ‘autorité locale’.

The rest of the world, or first-time observers, find our scale figures as extraordinary as the Ancient Greeks found Mycenae. They are naturally curious as to how we do anything purporting to be genuinely ‘local’ government on such a manifestly non-local scale, and, above all, why.  Good questions, but not for a local newspaper column. Indeed, not for the likes of us mere citizens and voters either, because no one’s bothering to ask us.

The major redesign of England’s local government is currently in the hands of Angela Rayner – Deputy Prime Minister + (in any spare time) Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government.  An early action was to cancel – arguably “legally risky”, if not unconstitutionally (see Google– ‘Cancellation of 2025 English local elections’) – nine May 2025 county and unitary council elections, she/someone in the Government having decided that these bodies had had their day and there would be no room for them in her new, but still undefined, single-tier England.

Rightly describing the UK as the “most centralised” country in Europe (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0xz4938z9o), Rayner’s apparent plan is to end central government’s micro-management by making ours, by a distance, the least localised – most Cyclopean – ‘local government’ certainly in Europe, if not the world (500,000 minimum), and, it would appear, without a great deal of consultation.

The ’plan’, in summary, represents the biggest and most transformative upheaval of English local government in my adult lifetime (sorry, you’ll have to work it out!), rushed/bullied through Parliament and local government itself with absolutely minimal consultation and consequential analysis. In short, modern-day Cyclopean local government.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Picture credit: https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/odysseus-und-seine-gefahrten-fluchten-vor-dem-zyklopen-polyphem/608942497

The Treasury’s Long Shadow: Why Local Government Needs Its Own Barber

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Philip Swann

The extent to which the Blair government’s delivery unit became the focus of tension between No 10 and the Treasury is a key theme in Michelle Clement’s fascinating history[1] of the unit. It was a product of Tony Blair’s ambition to reform public services and was seen by Gordon Brown as a threat to his dominance of domestic policies generally and his planning mechanism, public service agreements, specifically.

There are striking similarities between the Treasury’s “not invented here” attempted dismissal of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) and the treatment of the government’s missions in the recent spending review.

Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced in February 2023 that five missions would form the “backbone” of Labour’s election manifesto. In October 2024 the Cabinet Office announced the establishment of a “mission board” for each mission chaired by the relevant secretary of state.  In December 2025 the government complicated things slightly when it published its Plan for Change: Milestones for Mission-led Government. It set out six targets which, “guided by our missions” would “set clear milestones[2]” to track the government’s progress.

The milestones were: raising living standards in every part of the UK; rebuilding Britain with 1.5m homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions; ending hospital backlogs; putting police back on the beat; giving children the best start in life; and securing home-grown energy.

The missions were largely ignored in the spending review. Only one of the missions was referred to in Rachel Reeves’ speech and there were only 14 cursory references to missions in the core spending review document. This must mean that the missions were not central to the discussions about the government’s public expenditure priorities. This is so far removed from the way in which missions have been deployed elsewhere, such as by Camden Council. There missions were central to the council’s strategic planning and were used to engage partner organisations and the community in a concerted drive to address the challenges facing the borough.

It is clear from Clement’s book that the first head of the PMDU, Michael Barber, managed to keep the Treasury on board. His unpublished diaries are a key sources for the book, and Clement argues convincingly that, as one of the few senior figures who were respected by both Blair and Brown, he was instrumental in keeping the No 10-led show on the road.

In retrospect it is clear to me that local government suffered as a result of the differences of approach to delivery advanced by No 10 and Treasury. At the time the LGA, where I was director of strategy and communications, made a series of attempts to secure a more collaborative approach with government to the challenges then facing the country.

Local public service agreements (the name gives the game away) and their successors, local area agreements, became entangled in the Treasury’s target-laden bureaucracy and did not benefit from Barber’s more thoughtful “deliverology” which Clement refers to as an art rather than a science. Similarly the LGA’s “shared priorities, an earlier version of missions, got little traction beyond the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the then Audit Commission.

I do not recall any significant engagement with Barber, but I am not sure we would have made much progress. Clement refers to local delivery but not to local government and all the evidence suggests that Barber would have shared David Blunkett’s antipathy to the perceived lack of ambition of local education authorities (Barber worked with Blunkett in Blair’s first term).

It is not clear whether the absence of any significant reference to missions in the spending review was an oversight or a reflection of a bigger split between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. If there is a serious divide we do not know where the Prime Minister stands. What we do know is that local government faces an urgent task in getting the Treasury to give more energy and political capital to the fundamental reform of local government finance. It is also fair to argue that, if taken seriously, the missions provide a good basis for a discussion why that should be a priority for central as well as local government.

One clear message from Clement’s book is that people matter. Local government needs to find its Barber.

[1] Clement, M. 2025 The Art of Delivery. Biteback Publishing

 

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on central-local government relations at INLOGOV.

Win an election and implement your manifesto – that’s novel!

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Image: Emily Sinclair/BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c367lry5ypxo

Chris Game

First, a reader alert. What follows is in essence an only marginally revised column written for and hopefully published in this week’s Birmingham Post, to which for many years now I’ve been a regular contributor. Thanks, at least in part, to the “many years”, I’m permitted a wide scope of subject matter, but for obvious reasons local government in some form or other is what I tend to resort to most frequently – not least around local election season.

With the Post’s Thursday publication date, this is a mixed blessing, knowing that most readers interested in these matters would very likely have learned the results of the elections before they read one’s prognostications and predictions. What follows here, then, is my third column focused on this year’s local (County/Unitary Council) elections, which were, of course, limited to just 24 of England’s 317 local authorities (plus the Isles of Scilly) and precisely none in, never mind Birmingham, the whole metropolitan West Midlands.

Faced with the alternative option of ignoring the topic altogether, I decided to focus on the four West Midlands County Councils: three with biggish, if declining, Conservative majorities – Shropshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire – plus STAFFORDSHIRE: Labour for decades, but Conservative since 2009, and, until the May council elections, with 55 Conservative councillors out of 62, almost as Tory as they come.

However … since last July, when the county’s parliamentary constituencies all went Labour, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party had been energetically hoping to build in Staffordshire on what statistically had been among its most promising performances. And indeed it did: Reform UK: 49 of the 62 County Council seats, leaving the previously controlling Conservatives with 10, and Labour, Greens and Independents 1 each. The Lib Dems, along with UKIP, the Workers Party of Britain and others, failed to score.

It typified results across the country. On what nationally was an exceptionally quiet election day, Reform UK increased its nation-wide base of just two councillors (both on Hampshire’s Havant Borough Council), to a relatively massive 677 (39% of the total seats contested) and gained majority control of no fewer than 10 of the 23 councils.

One can only speculate at some of the results that a fuller involvement of, say, the 130 unitary authorities, metropolitan districts and London boroughs might have produced. I concluded that Election Day column, though, not with any numerical predictions, but with Farage’s most publicised campaign observation/pledge: “We probably need a DOGE for every single county council in England”.

Which could have sounded a touch presumptuous from the Leader of a party who had approached that Election Day holding just two of the 1,700+ seats ‘up for grabs’ – but not from Farage.

I did wonder, though, what onlookers would make of that DOGE acronym (or, in some versions, D.O.G.E. – that’s how novel it is). Indeed, even Reform candidates, who probably knew at least that it stood for the love child of President Trump and the recently very departed Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency, trod carefully.

Created, they could possibly parrot, to “modernise information technology, maximise productivity and efficiency, and cut wasteful spending”, but did they have any real idea of how the function and office might work in a UK political context? Or did they possibly assume that, like so many campaign pledges, even if, rather incredibly, a DOGE majority did emerge, it would find itself, at least for the present, on the ‘too hard just now …. we’ve only just elected our Leader’ pile?

Certainly I, while having at least some idea of what county councils having an English DOGE might entail, would definitely NOT have predicted that, within just one month of those county elections, one of England’s biggest and traditionally most Conservative counties, KENT, would be preparing to face an ‘Elon Musk-style’ DOGE audit by a team of technical experts assembled specifically to analyse its £2.5 billion-plus budget spending and assess its financial efficiency.

Since the past weekend, the ‘Elon Musk-style’ bit will possibly have been played down, but not, seemingly, the ongoing implementation. With LANCASHIRE – £1.2 billion budget – already announced as next on the list, this just could prove insightful and potentially serious stuff.

Until May 1st, Kent County Council comprised 62 Conservatives, 12 Lib Dems, 4 Greens, 0 Reform UK.  Since then, it’s been 10 Conservatives, 6 Lib Dems, 5 Greens, and 49 Reform UK. If dramatic change is to be the agenda, Kent seemed an apt and attention-guaranteeing choice. 

By any measure, and almost whatever happens next, that – in my book, anyway – is an impressive achievement. There’s been, predictably enough, ‘Establishment’ outrage – “a superficial response to the deep problems of local government” … “initiating a review of local authority spending misunderstands the circumstances facing local authorities … All councils have been caught in an iron triangle of falling funding, rising demand, and legal obligations to deliver services. In that context every local authority has had to make difficult choices to cut services …” (Institute for Government).

On the other hand, win an election and implement your party manifesto! – a demonstration that turning out and voting in local elections, even in our exceedingly non-proportional electoral system – can produce policy action.

Or, rather, especially in our exceedingly non-proportional electoral system. Two of the new Combined Authority mayors (outside the West Midlands) were elected on under 30% of the votes cast, and obviously a much smaller percentage still of the registered electorate.

This follows the recent ditching of the Supplementary Vote in favour of ‘First-Past-The-Post’, where voters pick just one candidate, and the one with the most votes wins – even if, as this time in the West of England, that percentage was under a quarter of an already very modest turnout.

To me, anyway, it’s arguably even more important in these local/Mayoral elections than in parliamentary ones – for us, the elected Mayors, and democracy generally – that voters can indicate their first AND SECOND Mayoral preferences, thereby ensuring that, however low the turnout, the finally elected winner can claim the support of at least a genuine majority of voters.  Which means electoral reform – but that’s another column/blog.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Do we need yet another body to help local government harness the potential of AI?

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Dr Caroline Webb, Dr Stephen Jeffares, and Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner

Does local government need a devolved AI service to help the sector successfully harness the transformative power of AI? A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) thinks so.

In their recent report “Governing in the Age of AI: Reimagining Local government” TBI make the case that local government faces several significant challenges – there’s a growing backlog of people seeking support coupled withdwindling resources and two thirds of funds must be spent on social care. Satisfaction is declining. Over £1.8bn is spent by the sector on technology, but innovation is stifled by a patchwork of legacy systems. The solution TBI suggest is the universal embracing of AI tools, but which is orchestrated, curated, supported and (one day perhaps) exploited via the establishment of a Devolved AI Service (DIAS).

The adoption of AI by councils continues to accelerate. Vendors of these tools extol the positive outcomes of AI, suggesting that “the day-to-day tasks of local government, whether related to the delivery of public services or planning for the local area, can all be performed faster, better and cheaper with the use of AI” (p3).  The UK, they argue, could save £200 billion over five-years though AI related productivity improvements (p7).

Whilst AI undoubtedly has the potential to increase the efficiency of some public services, we must pause to ask is it really the panacea that it is being marketed as, and are some public services being unfairly targeted by technology firms looking to promote their products and capitalise on an emerging market?

There is a clamour in the social care sector for example, which accounts for 64.8 per cent of the total budget for local government in England, to develop AI tools that can offer significant time savings, with the rationale that workers can spend more quality time with clients and less time on completing paperwork.  TBI cite Beam’s automated note-taking tool Magic Notes, that aims to transform social workers’ productivity by saving them s up to ‘a day per week on admin tasks’. Yet without external scrutiny and verifiable evaluation, such figures are little more than marketing claims.

As these technologies are capturing and summarising meetings to support some of the most vulnerable members of society, there is a need for local councils to interrogate these marketing claims critically before committing to such AI tools.  Despite safeguards such as ensuring a ‘human in the loop’, if these claims are not thoroughly examined there is a danger that these technologies may serve to reinforce and perpetuate existing biases, pose risks to clients’ data privacy and safety, strengthen process-driven systems which undermine person-centred decision making, and erode the relational foundations on which these services are built.

Of course, AI has numerous applications beyond reducing the cost of resource intensive casework. It has the potential to address some of the most despised and most intractable local policy problems (potholes, mould, chronic pain, mental health waiting lists). But the desirability of these innovations should not cause us to forget that these technologies themselves are not neutral, and just as they can lead to positive outcomes, if they are misused or implemented without proper ethical considerations, then adverse effects are just as likely to emerge.

The proposed introduction of a Devolved AI Service may go some way to ensuring a set of standardised safeguards, allowing for a coordinated approach to AI adoption within public services.  This collective approach could reduce duplication, provide practical support for the implementation and evaluation of sector-specific AI tools and facilitate a collaborative approach to working with technology providers to improve their products.  However, is it necessary to impose another central regulator on Local Government? There is already considerable piloting and evaluation of AI tools being conducted at the local level. These sector-specific evaluations are facilitating opportunities for shared horizontal learning across organisations. But it is vital that these results are shared, and that the evaluative measures and methods being employed are not imposed by the vendor of the tool, but rather determined by the needs of the organisation and the people they serve. Such evaluation should also consider more than value for money or accuracy, but also the experiences of frontline staff and citizens.

Ultimately, irrespective of how we chose to oversee the integration of AI tools, we must not lose sight of the fact that these tools should only be viewed as ‘part’ of the solution to providing effective public services, not the ‘whole’ answer as some technology companies may lead us to believe.

Dr Caroline Webb, Dr Stephen Jeffares, and Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner are academics at the University of Birmingham exploring how AI is reshaping frontline public service. Combining expertise in social work, public policy, and digital ethics, they develop training and research that support practitioners to engage critically and confidently with emerging technologies. Their work champions ethical, human-centred innovation in public services.

The etymology of quangos – and academic self-effacement

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Chris Game

Initialisms (abbreviations pronounced as individual letters) are obviously necessary and useful, but acronyms, properly defined (abbreviations pronounced as words), are surely more fun. That’s always been my rule of thumb, anyway. Actually, fun’s perhaps not the best word, especially as examples I’ve occasionally used include HIV/AIDS: HIV – initialism for Human Immunodeficiency Virus; AIDS – acronym for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

I suppose “seem cleverer” is what I really mean, because, in politics anyway, most of the big acronyms, while undoubtedly worthy, are so familiar as to be almost boring: NASA, NATO, OPEC, WASP – though I quite like POTUS, as I imagine President Trump himself does. And at least they’re easier to remember or work out – easier than certainly some initialisms like, say, LGBT, LGBTQI, or is it LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, all other)?

In modern-day UK politics there are only two acronyms I can think of offhand, unless you count voting for RON – the rather pleasing democratic mechanism, largely confined to Students Union elections, allowing voters to choose not to elect any candidate in an election, but instead to vote for ‘RON’ and then, if ‘he’ wins, for a Re-Opening of Nominations and the process to start again, until one candidate achieves at least half of the votes and is elected.

As nearly happened this year, incidentally, for the Presidency of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union. Not quite, though, and, while the eventual winner reckoned she had “no actual words to describe” her feelings, she most certainly found a few for her acceptance speech, which I equally most certainly won’t repeat here.

My Acronym No.2 is UKIP – the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist UK Independence Party, founded in the early 1990s and so labelled in 1993. All of which is leading to precisely … ? The Government’s promised/threatened abolition of all Acronym No.1s, of course: QUANGOS – Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations. OK, I know it’s not perfect, but it’s surely the best-known example.

You’ll doubtless have seen the various, and by no means co-ordinated, media announcements over the past week or so: that “Ministers could introduce legislation to abolish a swathe of quangos [nice concept in itself: a swathe of quangos!] in one go, as part of the Government’s plans to restructure the state and cut thousands more civil service jobs …. [and are] considering a Bill that will speed up the reorganisation of more than 300 arm’s-length organisations that between them spend about £353bn of public money.”

It’s apparently not quite as arbitrary as some of the early reports made it sound. As reported in The Guardian (April 6th): Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has written to every Whitehall department, asking them to provide “compelling justification” for the existence of each ‘quango’ or risk [it] being closed, merged, or having its powers brought back into the department.

Just like NHS England, possibly the world’s biggest quango, whose 15,000 staff were judged collectively to have failed the self-justification test, as it was the first to be scrapped, and that, “under the control of ministers, [will apparently] avoid duplication, bring greater accountability and save [unspecified amounts of] money”.

There’s an enormous amount to be studied and written about these developments, but not here. The sole purpose of this blog is precisely that set out in the title: to remind readers of what, to the best of my knowledge, is the etymology of ‘Quangos’ – not least because it involves an erstwhile academic colleague of mine.

When I first started ‘studying’ UK Government in the 1960s, at the Universities of Manchester (undergrad) and Essex (post-grad), Quangos simply didn’t exist – or, rather, they weren’t labelled, categorised and studied as such. That evolution took place during the 1970s, by which time I’d moved on, eventually to Birmingham and INLOGOV.

Leaving behind, inter alia, a former colleague who, by his own, invariably self-effacing, admission, was the actual author of our Quango acronym: Anthony/Tony Barker – though he, accurately, if pedantically – called it a near-acronym. If you need confirmation, though, just try Wiki-Quango-History: “The term ‘quasi non-governmental organization’ was created in 1967 by the Carnegie Foundation’s Alan Pifer …The term was shortened to the acronym QUANGO by … Anthony Barker, a Briton, during one of the conferences on the subject”.

It’s something to be rather proud of, you might think. If it had been me, I feel I’d regret it if, say, a whole week passed, at least during term time, without my somehow managing to ease it into some lecture/seminar/casual conversation or other. “I’ve just paid my TV license – £174.40! Outrageous – it’s just another Quango, you know”. “Did you see that bit in the papers about how they’ve found a way of possibly eliminating HS2’s ‘sonic boom’? It’s actually a Quango, you know?” “Yes, as it happens, I did invent the name.”

Yet Tony Barker, almost from the outset, was dismissive of something that he felt was overused, thereby misused, and “as useless as it is inelegant”. He goes into more detail in his 1979 book, Quangos in Britain, comprising mainly the papers delivered at a conference he convened on ‘The World of Quasi-Government’, describing the “near-acronym which I derived from a rather roundabout (and originally American) technical term ‘quasi-governmental organisation”.

But here’s the thing. Even in these early accounts, while not actually disowning the term and his authorship, he was his own severest critic – seeming almost to blame himself for creating a term that others have stretched to the point of near-meaninglessness – “they may be talking about any kind of body which has a definite relationship to the government or to local government”. I can’t help wondering what he’s thinking now, as the Government’s abolition programme gets underway.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.