In power, it has been an avid creator of executive and advisory bodies which stand proud of Whitehall departments. The reason is simple. Ministers are for the most part executive incompetents and so usually are their senior civil servants. They talk management but they have no experience of it. The trouble is management is not enough.
Quangos remain political entities.
They have been pulled back into the ambit of Whitehall - and ministers' offices. If Jack Straw is going to be savaged for the failings of the passport system he might as well ensure that the lines of command are direct rather than, as before, at a distance. Officially there are some 1,000 quangos. Some of the biggies are shown in the chart. Lower down the list, English Partnerships gives grants for the physical regeneration of, for example, the former coalfields.