Piloting an Approach to Identifying Preventative Spend in the Scottish Budget

Annex F – Social Justice Pilot

Introduction

As part of the preventative budgeting pilot programme, a pilot study was developed with the Social Justice 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 Social Justice Portfolio that cover a mix of different types of activity (preventative and non-preventative) and different levels of prevention (if preventative).

The final scope included 8 Level 4 budget lines (around £163m), which is around 19% of the Portfolio budget lines (42 lines), and 2% of the total value. The lines included are shown in Figure 34.

• Housing Support
• Discretionary Housing Payments Administration
• Discretionary Housing Payments
• Fuel Poverty and Housing Quality
• Scottish Fuel Poverty Advisory Panel
• Building Standards
• Equalities
• Baby box

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 Discretionary Housing Payments, Baby Box, Scottish Fuel Poverty Advisory Panel and Building Standards. For some of the larger budget lines, we used additional budget information or data to apportion activity. This approach was used for lines such as Housing Support, Fuel Poverty and Housing Quality, and Equalities.

Figure 35 – Social Justice Portfolio examples of planned spend within each element of the classification

Classification: Examples

Primary Prevention

• Baby box

Secondary Prevention

• Housing Support (groups at risk of homelessness)
• Discretionary housing payments

Tertiary Prevention

• Housing support (elements for those who have experienced homelessness)
• Fuel Poverty and Housing Quality
• Violence against Women and Girls (elements)

Enabling

• Housing Support, Fuel Poverty and Housing Quality

Acute/ responsive/ treatment

• Housing support – crisis support

Other

• Scottish fuel poverty advisory panel
• Internal SG staff costs

Results

This section sets out the results from the budget tagging exercise for those budget areas covered as part of the Social Justice Portfolio.

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 85% of Social Justice planned 2025/26 spending covered by the pilot can be defined as preventative (around £139m), while 6% was “enabling” (£9m), 4% was “acute/ responsive” (£6m), and 5% “Other/ general service” (£9m) (Figure 36).

Level of prevention

Of the planned preventative spend recorded, the majority of spend was classified as secondary prevention (73%) (Figure 37). Around 19% of the total preventative spend was spent on tertiary prevention (£26m), followed by around 6% on primary prevention (£11m).