quango

A quango or QUANGO (less often QuANGO or QANGO) 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 its pejorative use, it has been widely applied to public bodies of various kinds, and a variety of backronyms have been used to make the term consistent with this expanded use. The most popular have been "Quasi-autonomous national government organization" and "Quasi-autonomous non-government organization", often with the acronym modified to "qango" or "QANGO".

As its original name suggests, a quango is a hybrid form of organization, with elements of both NGOs and public sector bodies. The term is most often applied in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser degree, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and other English-speaking countries.

In the UK, the term quango covers different "arm's-length" government bodies, including "non-departmental public bodies" (NDPBs), non-ministerial government departments, and executive agencies.

Use

Canada

In Canada, quangos are referred to as 'Crown Corporations' or simply 'Crown corps'. As of May 2021 there were 45 Crown corps owned by the Canadian federal government, however many more are owned by each of the provincial governments. Notably electricity providers such as the ' Saskatchewan Power Corporation' a.k.a. SaskPower owned by the province of Saskatchewan and ' Manitoba Hydro-Electric Board' a.k.a. Manitoba Hydro owned by the province of Manitoba.

Saskatchewan

Saskatchewan is notable for the ubiquity of provincial crown corps with most styled with the prefix ''Sask''- followed by the primary service. The larger Saskatchewan Crown corps have their own Saskatchewan minister with all Saskatchewan Crown corps owned by the Crown Investment Corporation of Saskatchewan which in turn is owned by the provincial government. Some of the most notable Saskatchewan Crown corps are as follows:
* SaskTel (Saskatchewan Telecommunications Holding Corporation) providing telecommunications. Notable for the last remaining government owned incumbent telephone provider in Canada.
* SaskPower (Saskatchewan Power Corporation) providing electricity.
* SaskEnergy (SaskEnergy Incorporated) providing natural gas.
* SaskWater (Saskatchewan Water Corporation) providing potable water and sewage services to certain communities.

Ireland

In 2006, there were 832 quangos in the Republic of Ireland – 482 at national and 350 at local level – with a total of 5,784 individual appointees and a combined annual budget of €13 billion.

The Irish majority party, Fine Gael, had promised to eliminate 145 quangos should they be the governing party in the 2016 election. Since coming to power they have reduced the overall number of quangos by 17. This reduction also included agencies which the former government had already planned to remove.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, quangos are referred to as 'Crown Entities', with the shift occurring in the 1980s during a period of neoliberalisation of the state sector. In 1996, New Zealand there was an estimated 310 quangos, plus an addition 2690 that were school Board of Trustees (similar to the American model of boards of education). Other quangos from 1996 include: "...63 Crown Health Enterprises, 39 tertiary education institutions, 21 Business development boards and 9 Crown Research Institutes. But there were also 71 single crown entities with services ranging from regulatory (e.g. Accounting Standards Review Board, Takeovers Panel) to quasi-judicial (e.g. Police Complaints Authority, Race Relations Conciliator), to the arts (e.g. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, NZ Film Commission), to social welfare (e.g. Housing Corporation of NZ) and to substantial enterprises (e.g. Auckland International Airport Ltd)."

By 2003, the number of quangos had increased to an estimated 400 (excluding Board of Trustees), with more than 3,000 people sitting on governance boards that were appointed by successive governments. This appointment of people to governance boards has been widely criticised by political parties and political commentators as a form of cronyism.

In 2010, there were 2,607 crown entities (including Board of Trustees) with annual expenditure of $32billion in 2009/2010.

United Kingdom

Despite a 1979 'commitment' from the Conservative party to curb the growth of non-departmental bodies, their numbers grew rapidly throughout that party's time in power during the 1980s. One UK example is the Forestry Commission, which is a non-ministerial government department responsible for forestry in England.

The Cabinet Office 2009 report on non-departmental public bodies found that there were 766 NDPBs sponsored by the UK government.
The number had been falling: there were 827 in 2007 and 790 in 2008. The number of NDPBs had fallen by over 10% since 1997. Staffing and expenditure of NDPBs had increased. They employed 111,000 people in 2009 and spent £46.5 billion, of which £38.4 billion was directly funded by the Government.

United States

Use of the term quango is less common in the United States although many US bodies, including Government Sponsored Enterprises, operate in the same fashion. However, Paul Krugman has stated that the US Federal Reserve is, effectively, "what the British call a quango... Its complex structure divides power between the federal government and the private banks that are its members, and in effect gives substantial autonomy to a governing board of long-term appointees."

Other U.S.-based organizations that fit the original definition of quangos include the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation

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