Wednesday 6 February 2008

"Drive to curb teen pregnancy rate"

I can't believe they're grinding out this crap again *yawn* it's the welfare system that's driving teenage pregnancies.

What's interesting about this article is the number of quangos it mentions, and that's politely ignoring The Department of Health and Primary Care Trusts, at least we know that they are government departments and/or quangos, to wit:

1) The Association for Young People's Health is a straight forward quango, "supported by the Department of Health, England" according to their website. I love that "... ,England", it reminds me of Wayne's World where they are sent to "London, England". Update: according to Thursday's Metro, they will run a £27 million campaign, "half the money [will] be spent on innovative new ways of offering contraceptives and advice on sexual health matter", the other half to go on inflated salaries for middle managers, presumably.

2) Brooks only got half their money from the government, a relatively modest £364,000 per Notes 2 and 3 to the 2006 accounts. They've filed their 2007 accounts at Companies House, but not with the Charities Commission. They have a page of links to "Useful Organisations", yeah, useful if you're  Nulab insider with no skills or talents who needs a cushy job, more like.

3) The Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group is a straight forward quango, they even have a .gov.uk website. One of their 'members' is called Roger Ingham. I fell about laughing at that point and couldn't read any further ...

4) The Family Planning Association gets nearly all its income from Department of Health and various government grants, about £3 million in 2007, see note 22 of the 2007 accounts. It spent £7.5 million on relocating its head office, see Note 24.

2 comments:

Snafu said...

Mark, why would Quangos whose raison-d'etre be to cut teenage pregnancies ever *really* want to cut teenage pregnancies!?!

You'd never get a job at one of those agencies by telling them what they really need to do! They'd all be out of jobs within the year!

Anonymous said...

The more quangoes we have, the more teen pregnancies we seem to get.

There's no causal link, but do you think it would cut the teen pregnancy rate if the quangoes were abolished and the quangoids told to shift for themselves like any charity?