The road to bureaucratic hell . . .

. . . is paved with initiatives intended to clean up the bureaucracy. Some time ago, exasperated by the evidence on all sides of local government waste and corruption, I thought that it might be combated by creating a new "Star Chamber" of well paid, cold-eyed accountants who would land on local councils without warning and scrutinise every contract they had awarded.

Someone who had not been out of the country for 20 years, as I had, glumly told me that just such a body had been created, in 1982; and that things had not quite gone as planned. As Raedwald says in a post exulting over the abolition of the quango:

The Audit Commission was originally a small body of professional accountants sent on tour around Britain's local councils, schools, hospitals and fire brigades to ensure financial probity and proper stewardship of public funds. They didn't dictate what these democratically elected bodies should do - merely that the books should be straight. Their audit opinion was needed to sign-off public accounts each year, and a negative audit opinion was a powerful tool.

Today the organisation has become a massive, bloated, expensive bureaucracy at the heart of the central State, dictating policy and performance to each of the public bodies its grasp extends to. The fat cats of the Audit Commission feature prominently on the Taxpayers' Alliance's 2009 Public Sector Rich list, with a Chief Executive paid over £245,000 a year and scores of bloated minions. And this is particularly pernicious - because the money the Audit Commission's bosses pay themselves sets the standard for the rest of the overpaid, avaricious, grasping tax-stealers at the top of local government and the NHS.

Sigh. If we want honest government, it seems there simply is no substitute for an alert electorate prepared to get really rough with councillors who abuse their trust. I'm not sure either the necessary alertness or the willingness to get nasty still exists in Britain.