Media regulator Ofcom would be slimmed down by a “huge amount” under a Conservative government, party leader David Cameron said today.
Cameron said the Tories would make publicly-funded independent bodies more democratically accountable. He said that “in many cases” quangos were getting bigger and spending increasing amounts of money.
He told BBC Breakfast: “They start having their own communications departments, their own press officers, they start making policy rather than just delivering policy and their bosses are paid vast amounts of money.
“There is a lot of money to be saved, but more to the point, we want to make these more democratically accountable, so that people don’t feel the rage and anger against the machine that they have no control over.”
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Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has been asked to review every publicly-funded independent body within the DCMS’s brief to see which should be scrapped or slimmed down.
Cameron said there was scope to slim down Ofcom, the broadcasting watchdog, by a “huge amount”.
He added: “Give Ofcom, or give a new body, the technical function of handing out the licences and regulating lightly the content that is on the screens.
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“But it shouldn’t be making policy, it shouldn’t have its own communications department, the head of Ofcom is paid almost half a million pounds.
“We could slim this body down a huge amount and save a lot of money for the taxpayer.”
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