Calls for a big increase in UK spending on preventative policies

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Government spending on preventative policies from vaccines to family hubs should be significantly increased and the Treasury should create an accounting category to monitor it, according to a report by the thinktank Demos.

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04 Oct 2023

“What you measure really matters: that’s how things get prioritised,” said Anita Charlesworth, a co-author and the director of research at the Health Foundation, a thinktank.

Charlesworth said the Covid-19 pandemic had underlined the critical importance of prevention – yet the NHS does not report how much was being spent on preventative measures.

“Coming out of Covid, and coming through the transformation that vaccination made to our lives – if you need a textbook example of why prevention should be absolutely top of the list, both to improve our health and for economic benefit, you don’t need to look much further than that,” she said.

“Despite that, insofar as we can measure it, it looks as though we have been spending less over the past decade, and in fact we’re spending per person about a quarter less on some of the most