General Secretary Paul Noon described the government’s mechanism for implementing its programme – the Public Bodies Reform Bill – as “a legislative hammer to smash public bodies which are doing valuable work in the public interest.”

He warned: “This is more than a quango cull – it’s a massacre of the innocents.

“In many cases the government is abolishing bodies that cost peanuts but provide invaluable scientific or other expert advice to government. In other cases the costs of closure are greater than their running costs - or closure runs directly counter to the Prime Minister’s call for a ‘big society’.

“Much of this smacks of tokenism but where bodies perform essential functions in the public interest for the environment, health or heritage they must be maintained in some form.”

The union condemned the fact that many announcements had been made with little or no consultation with experts and users. It called for full and proper scrutiny of individual proposals and said that before abolishing any public body, the government should set out:

• what it actually costs
• what functions, if any, will transfer elsewhere
• the genuine net cost or saving from abolition of each body, after redundancy and the cost of delivering services elsewhere
• an independent analysis of the net wider economic, social, cultural or other costs of abolishing each quango.

The union pointed out that nearly 80% of non-departmental public body expenditure is made by just 15 NDPBs. Much of the money spent by NDPBs cannot realistically be reduced by simply abolishing a body: 65% of NDPB costs are in grants that are passed on to others, for instance to fund universities, scientific research, skills training, legal aid and other core government functions.

Similarly, Prospect questioned how subjecting bodies that provide co-ordinated action in emergencies (Environment Agency), or environmental protection (Natural England) to another round of unsettling ‘reform’ and upheaval could improve service provision to the public.

“Many organisations save the government much more than they cost,” Noon said. Where closure or reform results in valuable specialists being thrown on the scrapheap they will have to be re-employed as consultants at twice the price, he said.

Noon asked how the public interest would be served by abolishing organisations which ensure or deliver financial probity (eg Audit Commission), or provide expert scientific advice (Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee).

Science advisory bodies account for nearly half of all arms-length bodies. But most do not have their own budgets – they simply offer a way of bringing expert advice to policy makers at a lower cost than through consultancy contracts.

For example, two key pesticide advisory bodies (the Advisory Committee on Pesticides and the Pesticide Residues Committee) received just £66,000 of government funding in 2008-09.

On the Air Quality Expert Group, pollution experts are paid a nominal fee to attend meetings – far below usual consultancy rates – and undertake considerable amounts of work between meetings at no cost to government. If AQEG is abolished this support will be lost and the cost of obtaining expert scientific advice on air quality will rise significantly.

Noon said; “These experts are already delivering the idea behind the ‘big society’. Giving their time and expertise for the good of all, not for how much profit they can gain by selling that expertise.”