Piloting an Approach to Identifying Preventative Spend in the Scottish Budget

Annex H - Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands Pilot

Introduction

As part of the Preventative spend pilot programme, a pilot study was developed with the Rural Agriculture, Land Reform and Islands (RALRI) 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 budget lines in the Rural Affairs Land Reform and Islands (RALRI) portfolio that cover a mix of different types of spend (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, which is approximately 17% of the total number of Level 4 lines in the RALRI portfolio (86). These 15 budget lines accounted for around £143mn of spend, around 10% of the total RALRI Portfolio spend. The lines included in the pilot are shown in Figure 42.

• Natural Resources
• Peatlands
• Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority
• Cairngorms National Park Authority
• Economic and Other Surveys
• Programmes of Research
• Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh
• Contract Research Fund
• Strategic Policy and Sponsorship

Note: there are multiple Level 4 Budget lines covered by organisations such as Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Local Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority, and Cairngorms National Park Authority.

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 Natural Resources, Peatlands, Economic and Other Surveys, Programmes of Research, Contract Research Fund and Strategic Policy and Sponsorship. 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 Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority, Cairngorms National Park Authority, Royal Botanical Garden Edinburgh.

Figure 43 – Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands Portfolio examples of spend within each element of the classification

Classification: Examples

Primary Prevention

• Cairngorms conservation activities
• Loch Lomond and Trossachs conservation activities
• Natural Resources
• Peatlands resource and programme spend
• Marine funding for marine environment/ biodiversity, etc

Secondary Prevention

• N/A

Tertiary Prevention

• N/A

Enabling

• Advice on fishers management, aquaculture, etc
• Marine licensing and consenting
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh research into plant health, etc

Acute/ responsive/ treatment

• N/A

Other

• Economic and other surveys
• Programmes of Research
• National Park Authority corporate spend and visitor experience spending
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh spend on corporate activities or visitor experience
• General SG policy spend, e.g. strategic policy and sponsorship spending

Results

This section sets out the results from the budget tagging exercise for those budget areas covered as part of the RALRI 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

Of the planned spend included in the pilot for 2025/26, around 32% of the RALRI spend could be defined as preventative (around £30m), with a further 17% tagged as enabling (£16m). Around 8% (£8m) was tagged as acute/ responsive, while 43% was found to be “Other/ general service” (£42m) (Figure 44).

Level of prevention

Of the budgeted preventative spend recorded, all spend was classified as primary prevention (Figure 45). These areas of spend are important for protecting the environment and stopping environmental concerns impacting on people’s health.