Building the Preventative State

Almost every government strategy for improving public services rests on the idea that the State should shift from managing growing demands from users toward preventing them needing support in the first place.

Newton has worked with the think tank Re:State to launch a paper, “Building the Preventative State”, which shares the insights from a series of roundtables and a workshop on how to achieve the shift to prevention in different parts of the public sector, and ideas about how Whitehall can move from isolated to systemic approaches to prevention.

Prevention is a laudable aim – it can improve outcomes for the public and reduce costs to the Exchequer. In areas like health and justice the success of preventative policies is well documented.

However, despite widespread agreement by public sector leaders for decades on the need to reorient services towards prevention, in practice few areas have realised that shift. More resources are still drawn into dealing with the most acute kinds of harm and demand, with little change in how the State tries to prevent it upstream.

Preventative approaches can be highly effective, but to work at the scale needed the State needs to transform its approach – building the capabilities it needs to underpin the shift to prevention.

This paper, and the events series it was based on, was developed in association with Re:State.