Moving towards new approaches to public finance
Alongside our focus on longer-term policy responses to complex, intergenerational issues, we are exploring how our public finance model could be adapted to better support these policies.
One of the challenges of our current public finance model is its focus on an annual Budget cycle that is short, time-consuming, and not conducive to long-term thinking. For this reason, we have introduced innovative approaches to fiscal management, which spread new investments in the Health, Justice and Natural Resources sectors across multiple Budgets.
Through these processes, funding that would have been sought in future Budgets is being agreed now as a pre-commitment against the relevant operating allowances, providing agencies with the certainty required to embed system transformation and innovation.