It is the bonfire of the quangos, sounding the death knell for three of the biggest Government-funded organisations in the West Midlands.

Nearly 800 of the region’s civil servants look set to lose their jobs over the next 20 months with the closure of regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, company support quango Business Link WM and the Government Office for the West Midlands.

The Government Office is the latest victim, employing around 150 of its 1,500 nationwide staff at offices in Birmingham’s prestigious Colmore Row.

It acts as a “Whitehall in the West Midlands”, representing a dozen Government departments in the region and passing back local views and opinions to London.

But Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles announced yesterday he was shutting down all eight regional Government Offices, dismissing them as “agents of Whitehall” interfering in local decision-making.

The axe will not finally fall until the end of the Government’s spending review this autumn.

Mr Pickles said: “I do not believe the arbitrary government regions to be a tier of administration that is efficient, effective or popular.”

Unelected regional government equally lacks democratic legitimacy, and its continuing existence has created a democratic deficit.”

Redundancy

Meanwhile it is thought another 1,000 civil servants across the region will be fearing for their future as scores of smaller quangos also lose their funding.

The Wolverhampton Development Company is just one of a string of organisations supported through Advantage West Midlands that have announced they are wrapping up as their funding is cut.

AWM has started offering voluntary redundancy to its 326 staff as it prepares for closure by March 2012. The £300m-a-year quango has said it will start letting staff go from October.

The Government will replace regional development agencies with Local Economic Partnerships made up of representatives from councils and the business community.

Details of how the LEPs will be run are due later in the year, but in the meantime AWM has been told to cut £40 million from its budget this year.

It is reviewing funding for around 600 projects and says it should be able to say which projects will face the axe by September.

But an early casualty has been Business Link WM, the Quinton-based quango that aims to provide help and support to the region’s companies.

It has a contract to March 2012, but yesterday it was revealed AWM was cutting £11.3 million, or 28 per cent, from Business Link’s budget for this year, meaning it is having to axe grant funding schemes intended to help hundreds of companies.

Business Link WM’s chief executive, Lorraine Holmes, said there would be “a significant number of job losses” among its 240 staff.