In the United Kingdom, a non-departmental public body (NDPB)—often referred to and also known as a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation or a quango—is a classification applied by the Cabinet Office, Treasury, Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Executive to certain types of public bodies. They are not an integral part of any government department and carry out their work at arm's length from ministers, although ministers are ultimately responsible to Parliament for the activities of bodies sponsored by their department.
The term includes the four types of NDPB (executive, advisory, tribunal and independent monitoring boards) but excludes public corporations, National Health Service (NHS) bodies and public broadcasters (BBC, Channel 4 and S4C).
In 2010 the UK's Conservative-Liberal coalition published a review of NDPBs recommending closure or merger of nearly two hundred bodies, and the transfer of others to the private sector. This process is colloquially termed the "bonfire of the quangos".
Read more about Non-departmental Public Body: Contrast With Executive Agencies, Non-ministerial Departments and Quangos, History, Numbers and Powers, Criticism, Classification in National Accounts
Famous quotes containing the words public and/or body:
“Worn down by the hoofs of millions of half-wild Texas cattle driven along it to the railheads in Kansas, the trail was a bare, brown, dusty strip hundreds of miles long, lined with the bleaching bones of longhorns and cow ponies. Here and there a broken-down chuck wagon or a small mound marking the grave of some cowhand buried by his partners “on the lone prairie” gave evidence to the hardships of the journey.”
—For the State of Kansas, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)