Paper by Demos (UK): “Over the past two years Demos has been making the case for a fundamental shift in the purpose of government away from firefighting in public services towards preventing problems arriving. First, we set out the case for The Preventative State, to rebuild local, social and civic foundations; then, jointly with The Health Foundation, we made the case to change treasury rules to ringfence funding for prevention. By differentiating between everyday spending, and preventative spending, the government could measure what really matters.
There has been widespread support for this – but also concerns about both the feasibility of measuring preventative spending accurately and appropriately but also that ring-fencing alone may not lead to the desired improvements in outcomes and value for money.
In response we have developed two practical approaches, covered in two papers:
- Our first paper, Counting What Matters, explores the challenge of measurement and makes a series of recommendations, including the passage of a “Public Investment Act”, to show how this could be appropriately achieved.
- This second paper, The Preventative Shift, looks at how to shift the culture of public bodies to think ‘prevention first’ and target spending at activities which promise value for money and improve outcomes…(More)”.