In light of today's announcement - this chart gives some context on how NHS England accounts for almost half of government's total spending on ALBs, and how increases to its budget have been the main driver for the overall increase in funding for ALBs in recent years.

The current public body review programme will conclude in March. While it covered a greater proportion of bodies in scope of review than the previous iteration, its overall impact is unclear. It will be interesting to see what conclusions PACAC will draw on this in their inquiry on public bodies.

The former category grew slightly more slowly than the overall CS in 2012/13–2022/23. The latter increased dramatically by 43.7%, again largely due to the reclassification of Network Rail.

On balance, and the recent inclusion of Network Rail aside, ALB budgets remained fairly flat in real terms between 2012/13–2022/23. The exception was - unsurprisingly - NHS England.

There's less focus on cutting numbers of ALBs since 2017, and indeed the Lab govt. has announced a number of ambitious new bodies
(like GB Energy) to contribute to its missions. Full list here: www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/pu...

(I'm also pleased with this table we put together. It's simple but I found it very helpful to bring this information together in one place, and hope it's a useful reference for others. Worth noting a new addition to this was announced this week: UK Sovereign AI.)

I thought that this was the key chart: it shows how focus on the number of bodies can obscure more nuanced understanding of how staff and funding are distributed across them.

Yesterday the Cabinet Office public bodies team published their 2022/23 ALB report. It's a really interesting and well-visualised piece of work. Check it out here: co-public-bodies.github.io/ALB_Landscap...