We have developed the Future Generations Preventative Budget Mapping Tool to help organisations examine their budgets through the lens of prevention and well-being. It is a universal decision-making tool, working for all sectors and types of organisations.

It is designed to help organisations conduct an internal mapping of their budgets or accounts to understand where investment sits and help drive a change in approach towards prevention, as recommended by the commissioner in the Future Generations Report 2025.  

What does the tool do? 

The tool enables an organisation to enter budget information (or end of year information) and classify spending against different levels of prevention: 

• Primary prevention: Building resilience – creating the conditions in which problems do not arise in the future. A universal approach.

• Secondary prevention: Targeting action towards areas where there is a high risk of a problem occurring. A targeted approach, which cements the principles of progressive universalism.

• Tertiary prevention: Intervening once there is a problem, to stop it getting worse and prevent it reoccurring in the future. An intervention approach.

• Supportive activity: Indirect cost which supports or enables preventative activities to take place. A partnership approach.

• Non-preventative activity: Acting to manage the impact of a strongly negative situation but not to prevent problems occurring in the future. A remedial approach.

See our resources below to help you apply the classification.

In the mapping tool, you can choose two categories to break down your cost centres. The tool also allows for each cost centre to be mapped against your well-being objectives or the seven well-being goals, or other elements you’d like.

Why use it? 

The mapping is intended to make spending patterns more visible and support better conversations about future investment and in particular increasing investment in prevention year or year. 

Participating public bodies in our pilot reported that the exercise helped them identify spending connected with prevention and gaps, could support value-for-money discussions and could help organisations become more intentional about prioritising prevention. 

Developed through practice 

The tool was developed with the ZOE Institute for Future-Fit Economies and tested with Hywel Dda University Health Board.

A growing group of public bodies across Wales is using or exploring the approach. 

Download and get started 

Our tool contains a tab labelled ‘Tutorial’ which gives you step-by-step guidance on how to complete the tool. The prevention tabs allow you to map your budgets against the different levels of prevention and the tabs ‘Well-being’ allows you to map your budgets against well-being objectives, and/or the well-being goals, or anything else enabling you to create a well-being budget. 

The ‘Results’ tab gives you a dashboard presenting the results per category and per year with diagrams to help communicate your results to others. 

Ready to map your budget? 

Download the Preventative Budget Mapping Tool

To help you foresee what the tool is about, we have filled in the prevention tabs with mock data. You can have a look and play with it before starting your actual mapping with the tool above. 

See a mock worked example

Classification of cost centers 

In addition to the ‘Tutorial’ tab in the tool itself, we have created the following documents to help you map your cost centres against the different levels of prevention. Remember we are looking at the prevention of challenges to the population, places or the environment and not to services or the future delivery of services by your organisation or other organisations.