The chancellor has been urged to use next week’s Autumn Budget to amend fiscal rules to promote spending on prevention.
The call was made by think-tanks Demos and Institute for Government (IfG), accountancy body CIPFA, and charity the Health Foundation in a letter to Rachel Reeves.
The organisations said they welcomed the new Government’s emphasis on prevention in health, crime and other public services but highlighted the ‘long history of governments making similar promises, only for spending on prevention to become a casualty of pressures on day-to-day budgets and a victim of short-term thinking’.
Demos and the Health Foundation have proposed the creation of a new spending category called ‘Preventative Departmental Expenditure Limits’, which would see prevention sit alongside revenue spending and capital investment.
The IfG has proposed embedding prevention in the public spending framework by using the budget and spending review process to define and ringfence prevention spending.
Meanwhile, CIPFA is working with the Health Foundation to develop a methodology to identify local government spending on prevention.
The organisations said they feared that unless departments were held to account on long-term prevention spending, ‘the Government’s good intentions to promote prevention may once again fall by the wayside’.
