Politicians are great at telling you what brilliant things they will do if elected. But after that happens, deadlines tend to slide and getting round to making good the promises tends to drop off the agenda.

Bonfire or Bun Fight? When the Coalition took office, the Tory part of it promised a "Bonfire of quangos" and savings of BILLIONs of pounds. And they offered a hit-list of the 200 quangos most deserving of the chop. There were over 1,150 of these "quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations" when Labour was evicted from office, they were in charge of around £100 BILLION of taxpayers' cash. They are riddled with problems of cronyism and accountability, and the bosses of some of them were getting pay rises of up to 20 times the rate of inflation, and even bigger bonuses, when pay levels were falling in the private sector. So where are we up to a year later? Well, 151 of the "fire wood" quangos are still wasting taxpayers' money. And most of the people retired with the 49 dead quangos collected a over-generous pay-off and just migrated to another non-job in the public sector, thanks to the cozy "revolving door" policy for quangocrats and government cronies. The total bill for the first year's redundancy payments is around £70 MILLION and some of the bosses strolled off into the sunset with £200,000. And there are still 700,000 people in what are mainly New Labour non-jobs. Untouched The Advisory Board on the Registration of Homeopathic Products is still wasting taxpayers' cash on moonshine. The Committee on Climate Change continues to give aid and comfort to Global Warming Swindlers. The Equality and Human Rights Commission gives a little bit of money to deserving cased but wastes vast amounts of it on the unworthy. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact will do nothing much to stop foreign aid disappearing into the pockets of dictators and corrupt officials The National Policing Improvement Agency was outed for wasting £6 million on frivolities using taxpayer-funded credit cards, but it still continues on its merry way as policing standards fall. All 8 Regional Development Agencies are still failing to kick-start a recovery of the economy. In addition to the 200 quangos scheduled for the chop, the government plans to squash a further 120 of them into 57 taxpayer-funded organizations in the name of increasing transparency and removing duplication of effort and waste. But major cash-wasters will still flourish, untouched by the "bonfire". Inconvenient but true: Since the Coalition came to power, quangos and government departments @ Whitehall together are taking on new staff at three times the rate of redundancy/natural wastage. And that's after D. Cameron promised a freeze of civil service recruitment to bring down the Brown Mountain of Debt inherited from the last regime.   #