Doesn’t surprise me in the least:

Lady Deech said that quangos had to spend a fortune
to comply with a brace of regulations, including Data Protection,
Freedom of Information, Health and Safety and Equal Opportunities rules.

She
also said departments would only approve requests for more funding if
they were supported by costly reports from management consultants.
"Often the consultants’ report was more expensive than the equipment we
actually wanted the funding for," she said.

Anecdotal reports from friends within Leviathan tell me that this isn’t unusual, spending more on making a decision than the impact of that decision, either way.

Baroness Deech, an ex-governor of the BBC and former head of the Human
Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), said that the heavy cost
of complying with red tape brought in under Labour was the underlying
cause of the booming expense of the quango state.

"What really put pressure on us was the box-ticking,"
said Lady Deech. "It was non-stop: business plans, corporate plans,
reports, meetings with civil servants, meetings with ministers,
meetings with so-called ‘stakeholders’, public meetings, annual
meetings, reports, statistics.

"Only about a
quarter of our budget was spent on what we should have been doing – the
rest of it was on being what is these days called ‘accountable’."

It’s indoor relief for the bureaucratic classes. Get rid of it all….