Cheltenham Town Hall, public domain
It is possible that the now defunct council watchdog, the Audit Commission, was just another bloated public-sector body that urgently required serious slimming down.
Set up 25 years ago to oversee local government spending, the Commission was abolished in the so-called ‘Bonfire of the Quangos’ by the last Tory/Lib-Dem government. The bluff Sir Eric Pickles and his conservative colleagues called it ‘wasteful, ineffective and undemocratic’.
