Follow the money! Assembly committee calls for greater transparency over budget-setting on issues affecting children and young people
The National Assembly for Wales’ Children and Young People committee has called for closer examination of how much, and how well, money is being spent at local and national level on issues affecting children and young people in Wales.
The report recommends that the Welsh Government publishes a single strategy - and action plan detailing how it will be achieved - to maximise the scope for transparency on expenditure on children and young people.
It recommends that children’s budgeting statements should be produced every third financial year - to demonstrate the outcome of expenditure and provide a ‘cost-benefit’ approach to budgetary analysis.
“By putting such budgetary analyses into the public domain through saying ‘we had £X million, this is how we spent it, this is what we hoped would happen, and this is what did happen,’ we believe effective governments can earn public confidence and trust,” said Committee Chair Helen Mary Jones AM.
“A Government could have the best stated policy in the world, but if we do not know where the resources are going, we will not be able to trace whether the investment has been made.
“Ultimately, for Governments to demonstrate what their real priorities are, we need to be able to ‘follow the money.’
The report acknowledges that Wales is the only country in the UK whose government has initiated work in this field and states that, by the government’s own admission, it is still early for budgetary analysis.
But it states that resources allocated at a national and local level for Children’s Budgeting need to be examined and a more joined-up approach with Local Authorities needs to be adopted.