New report: ‘Being Bold: Building Budgets for Children’s Wellbeing’

Date: 26th March 2021
Category: Budgeting

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The report makes a case for directing funds to ensure children’s wellbeing and human rights in their early years are protected, not only to improve life outcomes, but also because it matters from a fiscal perspective.

 By allowing harm to occur to children’s rights, society incurs a monetary and non-monetary cost ‘downstream’, which the report says is inefficient, stifles implementation of policy and legislation, and slows ambitions for societal progress.

The report suggests that funding should be directed to tackle root causes of inequality and poverty instead. To achieve this, it makes the following recommendations:

• To have a post-Covid spending review, with all spend proposals assessed against evidence of impact on children’s wellbeing
• Training of the civil service to ensure effective budget development and analysis, and moving to multi-year budgeting aligned with wellbeing goals
• Establishment of an independent agency to support activity and scrutinise effectiveness of delivery of wellbeing budgeting by the government
• Create an overarching change to the ways of working in the Scottish Government budget process to ingrain greater transparency; cross-departmental working; and a participatory approach involving children.

Read the report in full here.

Find out more about child rights-based budgeting in Together’s State of Children’s Rights Report at page 24.