The government's ‘war on quangos' has destroyed such pillars of bureaucracy as the Film Council and the National Policing Improvement Agency.

Who cares whether Steve McQueen (a beneficiary of funding from the Film Council) wins any more Oscars; as for the police, Theresa May is sorting them out.

Some 300 or so quangos have been culled, saving a couple of billion pounds. However, the figures are squidgy.

The Canal and River Trust still walks and talks like a quango – how many councils have noticed any significant change since British Waterways was abolished and a giant charity took over?

Claimed savings mostly come from one source – the abolition of the regional development agencies. Local government had a chequered relationship with these big quangos but with their replacement, the local enterprise partnerships, councils have acquired dubious ‘partnership' with bodies that are business-run and unaccountable, together with a severe reduction in the funds available for growing local economies.

In this case quango-culling has merely been cover for cuts: the government is spending £3.9bn on regional and local growth in 2010-15 compared with £11.2bn over the five years from 2005-06.

Here's a test of whether the public administrative landscape has actually been cleared and become more intelligible.

Among the flora and fauna of Whitehall, I'd ask you to identify the Education Funding Agency (EFA). This is Michael Gove's ‘executive agency', which now sets the budgets of not just every primary and secondary school in England but controls the funding of sixth form and some further education colleges.

Is it a quango? No, says the government: it sits in the Department for Education, not at arm's length.

But the National Audit Office treats its accounts separately from the department's. Indeed the auditors have just put a black mark against them, partly because the EFA has allowed academy schools to run up huge cash balances with at least £2bn. Eric Pickles, so vocal on the subject of councils' reserves, has been conspicuously silent on schools.

The EFA example shows that the bureaucratic undergrowth is as rank as ever. Councils are still under the cosh of inspection teams.

The Care Quality Commission and Ofsted are regulatory quangos desperately anxious to guarantee their survival by over-inspecting in order to avoid any blame for service failure.

The government will claim a quango scalp by merging the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission into the Competition and Markets Authority, which starts up next month [April]. But the only difference councils may see is greater attention being paid to their contracting arrangements and more tours of inspection by quangocrats.

That, of course, is not the line peddled by ministers. The Department for Communities and Local Government story is that local authorities have been liberated.

Finally – it will have taken five years – the Audit Commission has been asphyxiated. Pickles and his colleagues still seem desperate to win councils' approval. We hear Brandon Lewis repeating hoary tales rehashed from The Daily Telegraph, as if he needed to convince himself.

Not a mention from DCLG towers of the way abolition has pushed centralisation and, for the first time, brought council spending under the purview of the Public Accounts Committee.

This chimes with the conclusion of a study of the abolition of the commission by the Institute for Government: it was whimsical, un-thought through.

‘Armchair auditors' were seen flying in the sky in August 2010 and have not been spotted since.

Implementing abolition stretched an already creaking department and delivered large reputational damage to the intellectual integrity of its officials, especially those who have signed off factually incorrect statements by ministers.

It's to the shame of its permanent secretary, Sir Bob Kerslake, that abolition has been put through without ministers answering any of the pertinent questions about accountability and performance management of local government that he raised in the major paper he wrote for the Cabinet Secretary in 2011 (Accountability: Adapting to decentralisation.)

Water under the bridge: the big question now is whether, in the new quango landscape, accountability and performance are better.

That's hard to answer while councils are struggling to cut spending – it's just not possible to compare performance without taking the resource base or grant changes or the local socio-economic situation into account.

In the fullness of time perhaps we'll get some honest accounting and be able to say whether the ‘regulatory burden' carried by local authorities has been lightened – albeit at a time when the data economy is rapidly changing - without having jeopardised the public's confidence in reporting and service quality.

David Walker is former director of public reporting at the Audit Commission