What is inside “quango spending”

The claim

In September 2025 the TaxPayers’ Alliance published Britain’s Quangos Uncovered, reporting that in 2023/24 438 quangos received £376 billion in government funding and accounted for £391 billion of public expenditure, about 32% of total managed expenditure. The figures have since been quoted in party policy documents, including Restore Britain’s economic paper.

This page does not dispute that arithmetic, and the figures broadly stand up. The Cabinet Office register puts the delegated budget for arm’s-length bodies at £369.8bn for the same year, within about 2% of the £376bn quoted. The counts differ because the scopes differ, and a wider definition legitimately produces a larger number.

So the question worth asking is not whether the total is right. It is what the total is made of, which is where the word “quango” turns out to be carrying most of the weight.

One. The money is extremely concentrated

Share of the £365.7bn accounted for by the largest bodies.

The median entry spends £8.8m. Twenty-five bodies out of 304 account for 96.8% of the money.

Two. Most of it is passed straight on

£224.9bn of the £365.7bn, or 61.5%, is recorded as money these bodies issue onward as grants: to schools, universities, research and health providers. The Education and Skills Funding Agency passes on essentially all of its £72.2bn. That does not make the spending imaginary, and it is still public money. It does mean a large part of the total measures a payment route rather than the running cost of an organisation.

Three. The bodies the word usually conjures are the cheapest

Advisory and tribunal non-departmental public bodies, the committees and panels most people picture on hearing “quango”, number 123 of the 304 bodies in the register. Between them they account for £49.0m, which is 0.013% of the total. Abolishing every one of them would not change the headline figure at the first decimal place.

Method, so you can repeat it

• Source: the Cabinet Office Public Bodies Directory, 2023/24 edition, published under the Open Government Licence. Downloaded whole, not sampled.
• Total managed expenditure is the directory’s own finance_spend_tme field, summed across every entry. Our sum and the totals published on the spreadsheet’s own headline sheet agree on all eleven comparable measures, to the penny. The loader refuses to write if any of them disagree.
• Negative figures are kept, not discarded. 4 bodies report negative managed expenditure because their income exceeds their spending (largest: Reclaim Fund Ltd, -£264.3m). Dropping them would have broken the match above, which is how we know they belong.
• Entry counts and body counts differ because some entries cover several bodies. Body counts use the directory’s own overall_body_numbers field.
• For comparison, the register total was £343.5bn in 2022/23.
• Scope: the directory covers non-departmental public bodies, executive agencies and non-ministerial departments. It is not a list of the whole public sector, and a definition that included NHS trusts, public corporations or regulators outside its scope would produce a different and larger count. That is the most likely reason the register lists 304 bodies where the quoted claim lists 438.