Where do Quango's come from ?

David Cameron, Gordon Brown and every other media tart in Government is promising "a bonfire of the quangos".

There are many of these organisations - I've worked with some of them in the past. They are full of people who once upon a time would have been civil servants, but because politicians like to fob off responsibility find themselves working for "independent" organisations. Of course politicians like power without responsibility so they then expand their departments to cover some of the same ground as a quango - the idea being that if there is a problem, the quango gets the blame, if things go well they say they did the work and take the credit. Essentially they are a way of doing something without increasing the public sector headcount. At least as far as the official figures are concerned.

However, listening to the radio today I could see where these sort of organisations come from. A member of the London Assembly and an architect were being interviewed about a fire in a block of flats. The architect found himself cold shouldered by the interviewer pretty quickly because he offered a considered opinion based on expertise. The Assembly member was much more the media's taste. Having been told that people had stayed in the fire for an hour and a half and that the design of the flats allowed for 3 exits from each dwelling she seriously suggested that people should be trained in how to behave in case of fire.

Yes, there should be teams of people whose job is visiting people in flats explaining that if the room is full of flame, it would be a good idea to leave.

Better still, the flats had been inspected and upgraded in the last 2 years. But according to our Assembly fire "expert", people don't like fire doors because they are heavy so they block them open or even take them off their hinges. Neither seemed to bother her very much.

This is where big government comes from. Wherever you live it is up to you to do your best to keep things safe. Working out how to get out of a building in even of a fire is your problem. I don't care how poor you are, or how bad your English is, you can do this. It's not a cultural thing, fire doesn't discriminate.

And if you disable the fire doors or other safety devices then you can't blame the government when this act comes back to bite you.

But of course the media will. So we will have fire training officers, even more regular inspections of buildings, signs in a hundred languages that won't be read and a whole infrastructure around this one event.

Which would have been forgotten about already if it hadn't happened in London.