By Fiona Sheil
In last week’s Budget, the Chancellor announced a new ringfence for preventative spending: the Preventative Departmental Expenditure Limit (PDEL). This will be brought in from the 2027 Spending Review with the aim of building shared resources and accountability around prevention and protecting investment that generates ‘benefits over the longer term’.
We welcome this. But PDEL will protect only what government recognises as prevention. This presents a design challenge – how to define this? And with violence against women and girls (VAWG) a contributing factor in so much acute demand – in children’s social care, homelessness, health and the justice system – is there a real risk that PDEL won’t recognise VAWG?
The detail of PDEL is yet to be decided. With government committed to halving VAWG within the decade, how PDEL handles it matters. VAWG is a priority and it presents many of the design challenges PDEL will have to address – costs fall widely, no single department has ownership, and its prevention evidence base is only emergent.
We propose that the Treasury uses VAWG as a test case to design PDEL. And with this in mind, we set out four questions.
Defining prevention: VAWG always involves more than one person
We have a classification problem.
Government’s strategy to halve VAWG rightly centres prevention. Thinking that preceded the PDEL announcement – by CIPFA, Demos, the Health Foundation and the Institute for Government – was grounded in the established three-tier public health definition of prevention: primary prevention stops harm before it occurs, secondary prevention responds to early signs, and tertiary prevention stops harm recurring or escalating.
As yet, this classification has not been consistently applied to VAWG. Classification involves judgement, so the same service could be labelled differently by different departments – leaving it uncertain whether it falls inside PDEL at all. And if PDEL favours some tiers over others, which tier a service is placed in will matter too.
But classification depends on who you are looking at, and VAWG always affects more than one person. RIVA’s partnership with Greater Manchester Combined Authority works with women in ‘intractable’ high-risk situations, living through prolonged abuse. For them, this is tertiary prevention. But in the original Middlesbrough pilot, resolving the abuse safely prevented many of their children being taken into care. For the children, this is secondary, even primary, prevention, with benefits across their life course.
A definition of prevention built around a single user won’t see this complexity. It risks creating a two-tier system in which one person’s support is ringfenced, and another’s is not. This isn’t just an equity issue – it would undermine effectiveness. These same challenges will apply to any work within families or relationships.
Building primary prevention: no evidence, no funding
The Institute for Government rightly argues the ringfence should cover all tiers of prevention. It also warns that departments will be drawn to tertiary work, which shows results within ministers’ time in office.
In VAWG this risk is acute, sharpened if evidence is the price of entry to PDEL. In VAWG, funding has increasingly focused on responding to crisis rather than preventing it. Together with a lack of strategic investment in the evidence base, this means practice and evidence in primary prevention are still nascent. The Government is taking welcome steps to address this, but they stop short of the What Works Centre that other policy fields benefit from.
This risks a vicious circle. Without evidence, primary prevention cannot be funded; without funding, it cannot build evidence. Is there a risk that PDEL bakes in tertiary prevention and leaves primary prevention out? If so, the crisis-led model that dominates VAWG may be locked in.
Costing VAWG: current estimates make it look far less costly than it is
PDEL is designed to protect spend that brings down future costs to the state. It will protect what it can see. So bids will need to be able to evidence the public spending they prevent. The Budget’s example is rough sleeping, where investment is justified by reducing “the significant fiscal cost of each individual sleeping rough, estimated at around £14,000 per year”.
This is a challenge for VAWG, for two reasons. First, the main national estimate measures something different. The Home Office puts the cost of domestic abuse at £34,015 per victim (2016/17 prices), but only £2,460 of this is spending by public services: the rest values the harm to victims. That is important to count, but it is not what PDEL is proposing to value and protect, nor the basis on which the Spending Review allocates public spending. The estimate also leaves out some of the largest costs to the state, including children’s social care and care proceedings.
Second, the costs of VAWG are often counted under other services. For example, domestic abuse is one of the most common factors identified in children in need assessments, and accounts for almost a quarter of homelessness relief duties in England. But that spending is recorded as children’s social care or housing, not as a cost of VAWG. National data collection on children’s social care referrals doesn’t even have an option to recognise domestic abuse as a contributing or present factor.
As a result, VAWG looks far less significant – and far less costly – to the state than it is.
Bidding for VAWG: no single department has the incentive
Who has the incentive to bid for VAWG prevention? The Institute for Government and Demos have long pointed out that the savings from prevention often land in a different budget from the one that pays. VAWG is a clear case: prevention funded by the Home Office may reduce costs in children’s social care, homelessness, health or prisons. No single department has a strong incentive to bid.
The Institute for Government has proposed joint bids by Whitehall departments, and for cross-cutting priorities, a named lead secretary of state. VAWG would be a strong test of whether this can work at the 2027 Spending Review. But departments will only pool resources if they can see – and agree on – how spending in one area reduces costs in another. We have no shared picture of how VAWG contributes to other government priorities, including the rough sleeping the Budget itself highlights. Without one, PDEL risks falling short of its potential.
Making PDEL work for VAWG
Including VAWG within PDEL is a first step. But a ringfence protects funding, not quality. Ahead of Spending Review 2027, we propose:
• A shared classification of VAWG services, developed by HM Treasury and system actors, including providers, commissioners and researchers, setting out where common services sit and for whom.
• A participatory system map of VAWG, a method recommended in HM Treasury’s Magenta Book guidance on complex policy. It brings together government, services, investors, researchers and women with lived experience to build a shared picture of where costs fall and savings land: the foundation joint bids need. RIVA is proposing this jointly with CECAN.
• A What Works Centre for VAWG. Government’s investment through UKRI and the Cabinet Office in building the evidence on VAWG is a significant, positive step. However, as Dr Laura Knight of the Youth Endowment Fund has argued in a recent RIVA Conversation, this needs development into a dedicated What Works Centre, to give a scale and pace that matches the cost and ambition of the policy problem.
PDEL will protect what government recognises as prevention. If it can recognise VAWG, it can work for any harm that cuts across government.