Piloting an Approach to Identifying Preventative Spend in the Scottish Budget

Annex D – Justice and Home Affairs Portfolio Pilot

Introduction

As part of the Preventative spend pilot programme, a pilot study was developed with the Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) Portfolio to understand how prevention features in spending across the portfolio. This Annex covers the approach taken in the pilot and some of the aggregate results generated from the pilot study.

Approach

The pilot was designed to cover a sub-set of Level 4 2025/26 Budget lines in the JHA Portfolio that cover a mix of different types of activity (preventative and non-preventative) and different levels of prevention (if preventative). Lines were selected for inclusion that met these criteria.

The final scope included 15 Level 4 budget lines (around £270m), which is around 31% of the total number of Level 4 budget lines in JHA, and 8% of the total value. The lines included are shown in Figure 26.

• Safer Communities
• Electronic monitoring
• Community Justice Scotland
• Risk Management Authority
• Parole Board
• HM Inspectorate of Prisons
• Community Justice Services and Prog Costs (Part of)
• Third sector funding
• Criminal Injuries Compensation admin
• Criminal Injuries Compensation
• Support for Victims and Witnesses
• Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission
• Justice Projects
• Legal Aid Fund
• Legal Aid Administration

The Level 4 Budget lines included in the pilot varied significantly in terms of value, and scope of activities covered within each line. In some cases, a simple tag was applied to the Level 4 Budget line. This was the case for the Risk Management Authority, Parole Board, HM Inspectorate of Prisons, Electronic Monitoring, Criminal Injuries Compensation and Legal Aid Administration. For some of the larger budget lines, we used additional budget information or additional data to apportion activity. This approach was used for lines such as Safer Communities, Legal Aid Fund, Support for Victims and Witnesses, and Community Justice Services and Programme Costs.

Figure 27 – Examples of Justice and Home Affairs Portfolio 2025/26 planned spend within each element of the classification

Classification: Examples

Primary Prevention

• Fire safety
• Firework control zones
• Community safety measures

Secondary Prevention

• Community safety grant programme (for at risk young people)
• Action against stalking
• Legal aid fund (funds to prevent cases going to court for e.g. homelessness)

Tertiary Prevention

• Preventing reoffending
• Electronic Monitoring

Enabling

• Risk Management Authority
• HM Inspectorate of prisons
• Community Justice Scotland
• Support for victims and witnesses (e.g. ASSIST programme, Rape Crisis Scotland)

Acute/ responsive/ treatment

• Criminal Injuries Compensation
• Parole Board
• Legal Aid Fund (excluding specific funds for at risk groups)

Other

• Community Justice Programme staff costs
• Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission

Results

This section sets out the results from the budget tagging exercise for those budget lines covered as part of the JHA portfolio pilot.

Note these results should be taken as preliminaryand could change between the pilot phase and the final 2025/26 budgeted preventative spend estimates planned for Summer 2026 . Caution should also be taken when drawing broader conclusions and comparing against other portfolios, given the exercise only covers a sub-set of the budget. The final aggregate results for the full portfolio (planned Summer 2026) may look significantly different from the sample of pilot lines.

Preventative spend

The pilot study found that around 15% of JHA 2025/26 planned spending can be defined as preventative (around £41m), while 4% was “enabling” (£10m), 75% was “acute/ responsive” (£202m) and 4% “Other/ general service” (£17m) (Figure 28).

Level of prevention

Of the planned preventative spend recorded, the majority of spend was classified as tertiary prevention (Figure 29). Around 82% of the total planned preventative spend was spent on tertiary prevention (£33m). There are small amounts recorded as primary and secondary prevention (£1mn and £6mn).