One of the least surprising pieces of news last week was that Caroline Spelman had abandoned the Tory Party’s pledge to abolish Regional Development Agencies: these will now ‘evolve’ into Local Enterprise Partnerships.

Yet only a few short weeks ago, Lord Hanningfield was telling people that the Tories would ditch RDAs by Order in Council (legally impossible but heh – we’ll be a new government, so why worry?).

To be fair, Spelman does little to conceal the u-turn: no pretence here that RDAs will be abolished to be replaced by Something Totally Different but Much Better. No: it’s straightforward evolution.

This is what always happens when oppositions turn into governments. Not only do they encounter Whitehall and other vested interests (a bad thing) but they also get a cold shower of common sense (a good thing) – don’t get rid of anything that works.

I am not saying that RDAs do work (the one in the East of England is notoriously useless even by RDA standards) but RDAs and other quangos do actually perform functions and spend public money on things that many of us may regard as useful.

The quarrel with quangos is their governance – they take decisions which should be taken by central or (very often) local government. This is where the dishonesty of Tory policies becomes particularly acute.

Cameron was claiming shortly after becoming Tory Leader that one of the ways that they would close the public spending gap would be to abolish regional assemblies. The implication was that these were vast, sprawling regional bureaucracies that were guzzling public money like it was going out of fashion.

In fact regional assemblies – demolished, as it turns out, by Labour before the Tories even got there – were modest affairs, the only sprinkling of democracy available in the landscape of regional quangocracy. The biggest beasts in that landscape are of course the government regional offices, about which the Tories are rather silent.

My warning to councils and councillors is simple: don’t secretly hope that any new government will seriously unpick the quango state. It hasn’t happened in the past and there are already good signs that it isn’t going to happen this time.

And if a quango is abolished, don’t expect to see any extra money for local councils. There may be some modest back office savings through merger or abolition. The front-line spending of quangos, however, will go where it always does – to Whitehall or another quango.

So: are we sorry that RDAs aren’t going to go? It’s difficult to be excited either way. But if the Tories really had intended to get rid of them, you can bet your bottom dollar that their tourism spend would have gone to Visit England, their industrial spend to BIS and anything else into a revamped Tory Department for Getting in the Way of Local Government (or whatever CLG ‘evolves’ into).