IF YOU want a seat on the board of a quango, move to London. You’ve Been Quango’d!, a report by the New Local Government Network, found that 56 per cent of quango board members live in London and the South East, compared with 2 per cent in the North East and 5 per cent in the North West and the West Midlands.

The worst capital-centric offenders include the National Portrait Gallery, 93 per cent of whose board members live in London, the British Council (80 per cent) and the British Museum (73 per cent). Quangos – nondepartmental government bodies – account for 21 per cent of public spending and influence government policy.

Chris Leslie, the report author and an NLGN director, says that public bodies should be relocated out of the capital and that local politicians should have a greater role in board appointments. “It is said that every post is [made] on merit, yet it cannot be the case that ‘merit’ is overwhelmingly visible in the capital city but less so elsewhere,” he says. “We suspect that the poorer the area you live in, the less likely you are to climb to the heights of quango board membership.”

Of the ten most overrepresented areas, eight are in London. The others are Oxfordshire and Rutland. Avoid Hartlepool, Blackpool, Darlington, Hull, Wolverhampton, Plymouth and Wigan if you want to join the “quangocracy”. Not one of the 1,000 board members surveyed lived in these places. www.nlgn.org.uk

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