Ioan Phillips: Who will address the (quango) state we’re in?

Ioan Phillips is a former civil servant who worked as a private secretary to three secretaries of state for transport.

If eighteenth-century Prussia was an army with a state attached, in the words of French philosopher Voltaire – then twenty-first-century Wales is a quango state with a country tagged on.

You might be tempted to stop reading at the mention of ‘quango’. However, these quangos, which are government-funded bodies responsible for delivering public services, overseeing regulation, and providing advice to politicians, play a significant role in the governance of Wales.

Despite the devolution era starting with then-First Minister Rhodri Morgan promising a “bonfire of the quangos”, the decades since have seen their proliferation. In 2019, there were 118 quangos. In 2025, there are 273 listed – a 130 per cent increase in just six years.

This increase is, for the most part, being driven by the Welsh Government creating dozens of non-statutory advisory bodies. Interestingly, whilst the UK Government wants to eliminate unnecessary quangos, its Welsh counterpart doesn’t seem to have received the memo.

All these quangos come at a cost. In 2022/23 alone, the Welsh Government provided 48 bodies with more than £11 billion in grant funding to support their operations (although it’s worth noting that a significant proportion of this money went to various NHS bodies).

Determining where certain quangos add value is challenging, particularly when many have similar and overlapping functions. When the Welsh Government embarked on education reform during the 2016-21 Senedd, it created the Education Change Board, the Education Delivery Board, the Education Independent Advisory Group, and the Education Strategic Stakeholder Group to help develop, implement, and communicate policy. (Why those functions couldn’t be combined into a unified body is a mystery.)

Just as confusing is the creation of quangos, such as the Ministerial Advisory Forum on Ageing, which seemingly only meet or report a handful of times, before falling into inactivity. An analysis of the publicly available outputs from Welsh Government quangos – here, defined as (ongoing) service delivery, regulatory oversight, meetings, reports, etc. – suggests that approximately a third have been inactive since January 2024. At the very least, a clean-up or archiving of the Welsh Government’s quango webpage might help signpost citizens as to which bodies are operational.

Then we have the composition of the quangos themselves, which highlights the extent to which they’re populated by actors sympathetic to the Welsh Government’s political priorities. The number of appointees who are, or had been, politically active with left-leaning parties outnumbered those who’d been active with parties of the right by a ratio of 8:1.

Analysis of the quango composition also reveals instances of the same individuals being appointed to multiple quangos. On the one hand, that’s unsurprising in a nation of three million people. On the other hand, however, it could be indicative of the cosy, ossified relationship between government and specific external actors. Either way, populating quangos with people and organisations who share a left-liberal worldview doesn’t feel like a recipe for robust challenge or scrutiny.

That said, it is Labour’s prerogative, as the popularly elected government, to create and populate organisations as it so wishes. Whatever one’s views about the party’s record in government since 1999, it’d be hard to disagree that Labour has very successfully managed to construct a shadow state that (helpfully) endorses its worldview.

This situation aggravates the right, yet it seemingly prefers sloganeering to strategising about how to change things. With under eight months until the Senedd election, it’s not too late for them to channel another philosopher, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, and plan its own Long March through the Institutions of the quango state.

Whether it has the desire or the discipline to do so is more uncertain.