York research helps Treasury model long-term benefits of early intervention in childhood

Posted on Friday 12 June 2026

Government spending decisions have traditionally struggled to account for benefits that arrive decades later: a child supported in their early years may go on to have better health, higher earnings and less reliance on public services as an adult, but these gains are hard to quantify at the time a budget is set. Researchers at the Centre for Health Economics (CHE), University of York, have developed methods for forecasting these lifetime effects, supporting analysts from HM Treasury (HMT) and the Department for Education (DfE) in improving methods for modelling the long-term benefits of early intervention in childhood and young adulthood.

An HMT analytical team – in partnership with researchers at CHE and colleagues at London School of Economics and University College London – have adapted CHE methods to develop a new analytical model to forecast the preventative benefits of government programmes.  This was used as part of a holistic package of evidence to inform spending decisions as part of the 2025 Spending Review. HMT colleagues have expressed gratitude to Ieva Skarda, Shrathinth Venkatesh and Richard Cookson for sharing draft code and working papers and for their detailed advisory input and feedback throughout this process.

The HMT approach to modelling preventative benefits was highlighted by Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones MP, in a January 2025 Institute for Government event on reforming the Spending Review process. The institute’s summary noted that HMT was “piloting a new model to forecast the preventative benefit of policies”, as part of broader efforts to consider long-term impacts in spending decisions.

CHE researchers and DfE analysts have also collaborated on methods for estimating the value of achieving a “good level of development” (GLD) during reception year, a key measure of early child development. This work helped DfE analysts explore how improvements in early development may be linked to later outcomes, including wellbeing and public sector costs. DfE colleagues have thanked Richard Cookson and Shrathinth Venkatesh for exploring analytical options and sharing early research findings, enabling analysts to capture impacts it had not previously been possible to express in monetary terms.