Like the subject says.
What is a quango?
Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization. A publicly funded body with a particular sphere of activity, that isn’t (formally) accountable to government. Not a private organization, not a branch of the Civil Service; organizationally, neither fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring.
The jargon is apparently “Public Body” rather than “quango” these days. Here’s the definition from the Cabinet Office’s website:
Quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation.
Essentially it’s a non-elected public body. The idea was to try and keep their functions away from meddling, short-term-thinking politicians, but now not in favour as all that they tended to happen was that they got filled with old politicians and their pals, and then given a budget with few people to answer to.
Examples would things like Arts Councils, Health & Safety Executive, some Water Boards, some NHS Trusts, some Police Boards.
Makes me think of the FOQNEs from Snow Crash: Franchise-Oriented Quasi-National Entities. Imagine a chain of embassies complete with extraterritoriality, but no mother country…
It’s spelled QANGO, too.
Re pronunciation, does it rhyme with “mango” or “bongo”?
“mango”
Thanks!
THe term kept popping up in a paper I am reading, but no definiton of it is given for us non-brits.
Quasi-Autonomous: not autonomous from the government when things go well, totally autonomous when things go badly.
Me? Cynical? You bet.
I used to work for the Office of Passenger Rail Franchising (later the Strategic Rail Authority (no, rail privatisation is not my fault), which was a quango and is now the less-catchy NDPB, or Non-Departmental Public Body.
The deal is this: the relevant Government Department (in this case, the Department of Transport (and whatever they’ve lumped in with it this year) gives a formal set of “Objectives, Instructions and Guidance” to the NDPB – in other words, “this is what we want you to do – go do it”. The OIG cannot be changed without a fairly complex formal procedure, and the Department cannot (officially) direct or otherwise meddle with the daily operation of the NDPB, as it could were it a regular gov’t department.
What tends to happen, of course, is that the meddling comes in the form of fiddling with the NDPB’s budget via HM Treasury, which wreaks havoc with whatever long-term planning the NDPB was doing, and also by a thousand other little annoying ways the Civil Service and the Government (which are not necessarily the same thing) can influence things in an informal manner.
As a postscript, I’d just like to add that having worked with Civil Servants, I can definitively state that “Yes Minister” was a documentary. And most CS’s would agree, and are proud of the fact. Go figure.
What, no Yes, Minister reference yet?
Is this some kind of irony that I just don’t get? Or does Michael need to remove the mote from his eye? 
I loved that show; most, if not all, of what I know about British politics came from watching Yes, Minister. And there’s an episode about quangos. It turns out they need a favor from a doddering old banker (Desmond Glazebrook, played brilliantly by Richard Vernon) and offer him a cushy job as chairman of a quango. And since he didn’t really have any industry experience, they give the deputy chairmanship to a trades unionist, because…
As I recall, there is (or was) a former ASLEF chairman on the SRA Executive Board.
The trouble is that the word “Quango” has been jumped on by the media and ocassionally applied to Fully-fledged Government Departments who then suffer from the negative image that “Quango” automatically conjures up.
I work for the Office For Standards in Education (Ofsted) and some newspapers (most recently the Guardian) persist in refering to it as a “Quango” - which it isn’t - its a Non-Ministerial (but fully functioning, responsible directly to Parliament and fully Civil Serviced) Government Department.
Ah well, c’est la vie…
No, because it takes two to quango.
D’oh!