A child's early years shape their health, earnings, and even their likelihood of ending up in the criminal justice system—but the long-term public costs of these risks have never been fully calculated in one place. Policymakers currently make spending decisions on early-years programmes without a clear, comprehensive picture of how much money they save later. This project will build that picture by linking specific risk factors—such as poor maternal mental health or low birthweight—to concrete costs across health, education, social care, employment, and crime over an entire lifetime. The team will use microsimulation to model how changing these risk factors alters public spending decades later, and will break down the impacts by sex and deprivation group. If successful, the findings could directly inform UK government spending reviews, helping officials decide both how much to invest in early years and where to target that money for the greatest long-term return. The work may also shift how different government departments—from the NHS to the Ministry of Justice—account for the downstream costs of early childhood disadvantage, making the economic case for prevention far harder to ignore.
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Research question What are the economic consequences across the life course of changes in key risk factors during the early years of life? Background The circumstances and experiences that shape early years development are important risk factors and protective factors for a wide range of later life outcomes and public costs across multiple policy domains – including health, education, employment, social care, and crime. These impacts can be felt right across the life course, including the primary and secondary school years, young adulthood, working age, and even during retirement age when many long-term health consequences of early years risks start to manifest themselves. Credible and comprehensive quantification of the long-term impacts of early years risk factors on outcomes and public costs at different stages of life would substantially strengthen the economic case for early years expenditure and support decisions about how that expenditure should be prioritised. Aims Identify measurable early years risk factors with credible evidence of important long-term economic, health and social consequences. Estimate the consequences of changing the occurrence and level of risk and protective factors across the life course, including a wide range of life outcomes in the domains of education, social care, income and employment, crime, health, and well-being. Estimate the long-term public costs of these life outcomes, including spillover costs on families and society. Determine how costs at different stages of the life course are distributed across policy sectors. Provide information about inequitable consequences by reporting breakdowns of the total long-term impacts of tackling specific early years risk factors by sex/gender and deprivation group. Methods There are five linked work-packages. WP1 will include one literature review identifying key early years risk factors for policy-relevant economic outcomes and another on models of long-term outcomes. WP2 collates and refines estimates of unit costs of future events and where necessary provides new calculations. It will also derive distributions around such costs which for our analyses. In WP3 we will conduct a microsimulation exercise to determine how changes in key outcome will impact costs. Not all effects will be modelled in our main analyses, due to some data being less available. These wider impacts will be modelled separately in WP4. Finally, WP5 will focus on the dissemination of findings, and engagement with young people and their representatives, parents of early years infants, policy makers and wider stakeholders. Timelines July 2025-December 2025: Literature reviews January 2026-June 2027: Unit cost exercise July 2026-December 2027: Economic modelling activities July 2025-December 2027: Dissemination and engagement activities Impact and dissemination Findings will support policy decisions around both the overall scale of investment in the early years, during annual spending review negotiations, and how that money is spent on targeting different early years risk factors. In addition to academic outputs and direct engagement with the central government officials who want to use our findings, with our PPIE partner we will co-produce an engagement strategy to ensure that results are relevant to, and accessed by, young people, families, and agencies supporting them.
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