Bill Carmichael: Big wheels of quango Britain

The task, set to me by reader Ian Ingles from Hessle in East Yorkshire, seemingly was a simply one – to work out who is responsible for a new cycle route across the Yorkshire Wolds, who paid for it and who is accountable for how the money was spent. Easy I thought. It is a cycle route – just how complicated can it be?

OK now for a taste of that alphabet soup; the cycle route, it turns out, was created by an ATP called VHEY as part of its YWDP, which has been partly funded by a LAG called the CWWW scheme which in turn is part of the LEADER programme.

Got that? No, I thought not, so let’s start again. The Area Tourism Partnership (ATP) is Visit Hull and East Yorkshire (VHEY), which runs the Yorkshire Wolds Development Programme (YWDP) which is funded by a Local Action Group (LAG) called the Coast, Wolds, Wetlands and Waterways (CWWW) scheme as part of the Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l’Économie Rurale (LEADER) programme set up by the European Union (EU).

Your head may be spinning, but I’m afraid we haven’t finished yet. The LEADER scheme is part of the RDPE (Rural Development Programme for England), which is funded partly by Defra (Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs) and EAFRD (European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development), which has come under the auspices of yet another quango, Yorkshire Forward.

Most of these acronyms have their own website and presumably staff, premises and budget. And once you dip into one of these organisations you find dozens more. There is, for example, the Humber Rural Partnership (HDR), which runs the Rural Pathfinder Delivery Programme (RPDP), not to mention the Rural Access to Opportunities Programme (RAOP) and – heaven help us – the Yorkshire Green Triangle (GYT).

They are breeding like rabbits!

I’m all for rural development, but I don’t think employing thousands of bureaucrats – a good many of them located no doubt in Brussels – is going to help a country pub or farmhouse B&B survive the recession.

As it happens, Mr Ingles has a special interest in all this. Some years ago he was the Senior Rights of Way Officer at Humberside County Council and he produced leaflets publicising similar routes for walkers, cyclists and horse riders.

“I’d walk the route myself, do a bit of research and show the results to my boss, and he said ‘OK let’s do it’. We didn’t have meetings, we just did it. Oh and it earned the council about £8,000 a year in profit,” he said.

So did I rise to Mr Ingles’ challenge? Partly. I think a combination of about half a dozen quangos probably created the cycle route, but as to who is accountable for how the money is spent, I’m afraid I’ve no idea.

As for who pays for all of this, that’s an easy one – you do!

Mangled logic

Labour’s Angela Eagle was critical of the Chancellor’s speech at the Conservative party conference this week, saying: “Far from riding out the storm, George Osborne ripped out the foundations of the house as the storm was brewing by choking off the British recovery last autumn.”

Ugh! This isn’t so much mixing metaphors as blitzing them full power in a blender. The Bridlington-born Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the politician David Cameron famously told to “calm down” in the Commons, is entitled to criticise the Government, but can’t she do so without this horrible mangling of the English language?