Representation to Spending Review 2025

On 9 February, TRL Insight made a representation to the Spending Review 2025. The Spending Review will be announced on 11 June 2025. The representation covers:

  • Return on investment – recommending that the Treasury becomes systematic in using existing analyses to identify public spending which will provide a return on investment, perhaps by bringing in experts on this topic;
  • Investment in social care and public health – this summarises the case made in my LinkedIn article Why putting money into fixing the NHS is wrong (see below);
  • Policies to reduce offending and reoffending – this points out that in the Government’s Plan for Change, the Safer Streets mission fails to mention the benefits in cutting crime flowing from policies in the other missions. This suggests a lack of coordination between departments. The representation recommends building up an evidence base on what works to cut crime and basing policy on this;
  • A toolkit for carbon reduction – recommending a focus on publicly recognising the need for a balanced toolkit of solutions to reach net zero. The representation lists six examples and also urges the Government to consider how it can support the UK’s green export economy;
  • Putting people in charge – points out that taking planning powers away from local communities and pushing local government into unitarization could both be false economies;
  • Local authority finances and property taxes – creating a fresh round of Tax Increment Financing, broadening the tax base for local government, creating partnership arrangements with local authorities to invest in prevention and early intervention and share the savings or income generated, and extending the Prudential System for capital finance to cover investment in prevention and early intervention;
  • Public finance reforms and metrics for improvement – this summarises my letter to the Chancellor and Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the report Building Freedom (see below). It also recommends that the two economic measures in the Government’s milestone of higher living standards are supplemented with a measure of quality of life/satisfaction, based on polling.