Powering Prevention: How to reform the state’s financial architecture to enable preventative people-centred public service reform

This paper forms part of Demos’s Powering Public Service Reform programme, which explores how government can deliver more preventative, people-centred public services. It focuses on one of the most significant barriers to that ambition: the state’s financial architecture.

While there is growing consensus that prevention can improve outcomes for citizens and reduce long-term pressure on public services, existing funding systems continue to favour short-term, reactive spending. This paper examines the financial, institutional and political barriers that prevent preventative approaches from being adopted at scale.

It sets out a practical framework for reform, focusing on tangible specific measures that, when taken together, articulate a funding approach that enables the adoption of preventative measures at scale and as a core function of government rather than as an approach to be piloted.