Policy & Resources has been piloting ‘priority-based budgeting’ – a process of reviewing individual services and ranking them by priority to decide what should be funded. The committee said a pilot across three areas had identified £400,000 of recurring ‘cashable’ savings, now built into the 2027 Budget, at a one-off cost of about £300,000 in redeployed staff time. Three departments have been involved in the initial pilot scheme – the Environment & Infrastructure Committee, States Property Unit under Policy & Resources, and Adult Disability Services.
Some 150 individual services are being examined, with officers saying the report held ‘multiple times’ more potential savings, subject to committee approval.
But Deputy Sloan was unconvinced by the effort involved.
‘It sounds like very hard work to get small amounts of savings,’ he said, contrasting the approach with zero-based budgeting, under which every line of spending is justified from scratch each year, rather than starting from the previous year’s figure.
He said he had used zero-based budgeting during his own time at the States as the States economist, and ‘that wasn’t that difficult’.
P&R defended the pilot scheme, saying it had delivered genuine savings as well as ‘operational benefits’, and that the departments involved had gained a far better understanding of their own costs. The committee also confirmed a change in method this year – rather than giving committees their previous baseline plus inflation to work from, they were given only the baseline as a starting point.