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Barnett Formula

My Lords, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which I think my noble friend is referring to, is of a different kind. Perhaps I can discuss what is involved in that with my noble friend outside the Chamber. I was challenging whether we need another quango, and the Office for Budget Responsibility is not one of those. The TaxPayers’ Alliance has estimated that there are currently more than 1,100 quangos spending a total of £64 billion a year. I know the Government produce slightly different figures, but nevertheless there is an agreement that there are a lot of quangos and they spend a lot of money. My party’s policies are to reduce the money spent on quangos and indeed on Whitehall by one-third over the next Parliament. Even the Government have said that they would abolish or merge 120 quangos to save £500 million. That makes it very difficult to sign up to creating another quango, because it would make the job of controlling the costs of them even harder. Furthermore, against the background of reducing the cost of Whitehall, it would also be hard to find the resources to do the work within the budgets of Whitehall departments. We are committed to cutting the cost of bureaucracy while protecting front-line services, but the review of a funding formula would not be a front-line service. The cost would have to compete with all the other priorities within Whitehall. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, wishes to—