States looks to make savings with ‘priority-based budgets’

After the States approved the launch of a zero-based budgeting programme earlier this year by backing an amendment from Deputy Haley Camp, the new politician followed up by asking the Policy & Resources Committee for a progress report.

The committee said that it was pursuing ‘priority-based budgeting’ – ‘a structured critical review of all expenditure from the bottom up’ – rather than zero-based, but hoped to achieve similar results by challenging business-as-usual expenditure. It said that using zero as a starting point would be more labour intensive.

PBB has been used in the past for one-off service reviews and so the States said that it already had some experience and expertise in this area.

Its first results should be included in the 2027 annual Budget.

It is pursuing a rolling programme across committees, focusing initially on the States Property Unit, the breadth of the work of the Environment & Infrastructure Committee, and Adult Disability Services.

P&R said it had selected these areas for different reasons – it wanted to see one of its corporate services involved as part of the initial tranche of work, particularly given the perception that costs had increased since the service was centralised; E&I is one of the smaller committee budgets; and adult disability was already considered to have budgetary challenges and could benefit from a sharper focus. HSC was too big to tackle in one go, it admitted.

‘Once the first tranche of services has been completed using PBB, a plan for the rolling review of all services will be put in place to ensure that this approach fully informs the 2028 Budget-setting process,’ the committee added in the response to Deputy Camp.

‘Given the scale and complexity of the organisation, such reviews cannot be undertaken for each service on an annual basis, but we anticipate that all services will be reviewed approximately every three years.

‘The only barriers to this work will be resourcing and ensuring that ongoing service delivery can be balanced with the requirement for priority-based budgeting.’

When she laid the amendment, Deputy Camp said that demonstrating improved financial management had to be a priority for the States to demonstrate increased transparency.

Changing the basis of budgeting would enhance accountability, support sustainable public finance and strengthen confidence in how public resources were being used, she said.