Government Recruitment out of Control

Today, the Daily Mail reports that thousands of new staff have been recruited by quangos since this government came to power, in spite of a promise to "have a bonfire of quangos".
What is it about governments that makes them unable to reduce the size of the Civil Service and Quangos? Companies manage to do so, Only yesterday Barclays announced a large number of job cuts, following in the footsteps of a number of other public companies over the last few weeks.

Last year the company for which my daughter works merged with another company and the board immediately instituted a virtual ban on all new recruitment. All requests for new staff had to be referred to the board and had to include a job description of the post, and an explanation of why the job was required and why it couldn't be shared amongst existing staff, etc. These papers had to be agreed and countersigned by the appropriate managers. The board made it clear that they would investigate the veracity of the various statements, and anyone found to have provided misleading information could quite easily find themselves on the redundancy list.

It seems that very few of the management staff were prepared to put forward any applications and my daughter noticed, perhaps not surprisingly, that a number of tasks were suddenly deemed no longer essential by managers. Staff reductions have been achieved by natural wastage and everybody seems happy from the board down to the lowest members of staff who feel that there jobs are now more secure.

Now why can't the Government do something like this. Every department should be told that they are absolutely banned from taking on staff unless each individual post has been approved by the Departmental Select Committee, and that staff of all levels could be called before them to explain and justify the post. This sort of approach works in the Private Sector, why should it not work in the Civil Service and Quangos?