Pay for quango bosses is out of control

Nobody knows how many quangos there are, nor how much they’re costing us. But with some chief executives getting nearly £1m a year, it adds up to a quite a tidy sum, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

150928-crossrail

Crossrail's Andrew Wolstenholme gets £910,000 a year

Queen Street in Edinburgh is sometimes referred to as Quango Street. Why? Walk down it and every second sign tells you that the building is inhabited by either a charity or a group of supposedly semi-independent but state-financed government agencies.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.