Reported by The Guardian
PDEL, which will ringfence money for preventive policies, marks a welcome and potentially consequential addition
John Healey’s debut budget was far from a blockbuster, but it may come to be remembered for the birth of a plucky new character in the tax and spend universe – little PDEL.
It may not have the charm of Disney’s Wall-E, but PDEL (pronounced P-Del), or preventative departmental expenditure limit, to give it its full name, marks a welcome, and potentially very consequential, addition.
More from the original report
The chancellor made clear that ahead of what the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said will be a “brutal” spending review next year, the Treasury is prepared to ringfence the budget for preventive policies.
The impetus for the move came partly from No 10. Andy Burnham knows that to achieve some of the missions closest to his heart, such as tackling rough sleeping , he will have to make the argument that it’s worth spending more upfront to save the state in the longer term.
It’s an intuitive idea, yet it’s not how the government tends to think about spending – and it’s certainly not how the Treasury makes decisions.
In the cut and thrust of a spending review, a process in which the Treasury’s power over the public purse is at its most muscular, individual departments are under pressure to show how they will save money from their own budgets.
Yet many of society’s greatest challenges have impacts across several departments. The future savings made by spending on, say, family hubs, may show up years in the future, and across several other departments – in the welfare bill, the health budget, even the criminal justice system.
In a 2023 paper that introduced the idea of PDEL , the thinktank Demos identified £22bn of costs to government that it claimed could have been averted by preventive programmes.
“For decades, governments have talked about the importance of prevention, but the system has consistently rewarded spending on dealing with crises rather than stopping them from happening in the first place,” said Demos’s chief executive, Polly Curtis.
In the Treasury documents that accompany…