Piloting an Approach to Identifying Preventative Spend in the Scottish Budget
This report sets out the results from a pilot of the Preventative Budgeting Tool, which ran between December 2025 and May 2026 and focused on testing a method for identifying planned preventative spending across parts of the Scottish Budget 2025/26.
Footnotes
1 Scottish Spending Review 2026 - gov.scot
2 Scotland’s Public Service Reform Strategy Delivering for Scotland.
3 Preventative Budgeting Tool – gov.scot
4 Scottish Spending Review 2026 - gov.scot
5 Preventative Budgeting Tool – gov.scot
6 Defining Prevention – gov.scot
7 Christie Commission on the future delivery of public services - gov.scot
8 Scotland's Public Service Reform Strategy: Delivering for Scotland - gov.scot
9 Scotland's Population Health Framework - gov.scot
10 Scotland's Public Service Reform Strategy: Delivering for Scotland - gov.scot
11 Green Budget Tagging | OECD
12 Preventative Budgeting Tool – gov.scot
14 Apportionment in this context means using data or informed rules of thumb, to assess what percentage of the total spend could be allocated to each category (e.g. preventative or acute).
15 For CIPFA methodology – see Investing in prevention
17 Preventative Budgeting Tool – gov.scot
18
20 Note this is higher than the total portfolio spending because of the income received from budget lines outside of the scope of this report, such as Scottish Water (which received funding through charges).
Contact
Email: PreventionUnit@gov.scot