I've just been reading The TaxPayer's Alliance "The Case for Abolishing Regional Development Agencies" (.pdf). It provides some evidence I hadn't been aware of and is a convincing argument for saving £2.19bn in 2009/10 which could be used to fund a tax cut from 22% to 18% for SMEs. This section on executive pay made me laugh out loud:
RDAs argue that such pay is necessary to attract the best people to what is a demanding job. But considering RDAs are supposedly ‘business led’, few of their Chief Executives reflect this. Pam Alexander has spent all of her career in the public sector. Alan Clarke of One North East has never worked in business either. Nor is the job ‘demanding’: RDAs do not have to raise funds to operate, they provide no essential service, they do not create a product, face no competition and are accountable to no-one. Few less demanding executive jobs could be found.
"they do not create a product"
Wow, just when you thought the 'TaxPayers Alliance' couldn't get any stupider, they come up with something like this.
Posted by: Jim | August 11, 2010 at 06:37 PM
Out of interest, is this a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" or do you have a reason to actually think the RDAs perform a useful role?
I'd have thought that giving billions of pounds to your pals to give out as they see fit, with little to no oversight, is something all sides can agree is problematic.
I don't see any ideological element here... this is crony capitalism
Posted by: aje | August 12, 2010 at 10:02 AM
At first glance (and it is just a glance, I've only skim read the pdf, so feel free to contradict my lazy errors) this looks like a typical TPA document. Rather than a detailed analysis we get a subjective reading of a bundle of statistics. So, evidence is produced that regional economic output (excluding London and the South East) has slowed since the RDAs were launched, but there is no attempt to look at whether things would have been worse without the RDAs, just a bald statement that they must have failed and an assertion that "favourable and stable economic conditions in the UK have encouraged increased investment in the regions" without anything to back it up. We get a slew of TPAisms: vague, caveat ridden worthless nonsense ("figures could also be affected by tougher enforcement of VAT registration rules, which may explain the national rise in 2003" (my emphasis)); unsupported statements (when criticising quango overlap the reports asks "Do businesses need RDAs to give them inexpert advice as well?", but unless I missed it there is no information on the quality of advice the RDAs provide); sloppy proofreading ("RDAs should be abolished and power devolved from away from central government to civil society", not to mention that the concept of civil society is unexplored). The idea that the RDAs are folded to pay for a tax cut may be fine, but hard to see how this would address the TPA's supposed concern about the regional economic output of those areas outside London and the South East.
I can well believe that the RDAs are an expensive waste of money, but this is not the report to uncover it. Is Pam Alexander bad at her job? We knows, the fact that she's spent her entire career in the public sector is all we're told. How do we know that working for an RDA is not demanding? Because of a list of things that RDAs don't do, rather than any attempt to understand what they do do. We get cherry picked stats complaining about wasteful spending which are meaningless out of context. We find that the chief executives are (too?) well remunerated, without any understanding of what their job entails. We are told that they are unaccountable, but the how is glossed over unless we read another TPA document, but one a day is quite enough.
What do we actually learn? That the TPA want to cut spending and lower taxes. But, we knew that already.
Posted by: Quinn | August 12, 2010 at 02:17 PM
You'll note that my comment was not actually defending the RDA's, just criticising the gobsmacking idiocy of the TPA, who seem to have never encountered the concept of a government agency before.
I'm not that familiar with the RDA record myself, and I think the value for money of this kind of activity is fairly difficult to assess for a variety of reasons. But there have been attempts, by PWC (http://www.englandsrdas.com/funding-and-accountability/national-impact-evaluation-reports) and the National Audit Office (http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0910/regional_regeneration.aspx). Both were fairly positive, though as you would expect found room for improvement.
The NAO reports (there have been more since - http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/1011/rda_reviews.aspx) seem pretty thorough to me, so there's absolutely no basis for your claim that there was 'little to no oversight', let alone the 'giving billions of pounds to your pals' nonsense. As for failing to see *any* ideological element in the TPA's 'analysis' ... surely you can't be that naive?
Posted by: Jim | August 12, 2010 at 06:33 PM
I should have said, Quinn is spot on. The TPA clearly just wanted to do a hatchet-job. Proper analysis would have just got in the way.
Posted by: Jim | August 12, 2010 at 06:34 PM
It's so nice to have you do all of the research for us. It makes our decision making so much easier!! Thanks.
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