MS, Cabinet Secretary for Social
Justice, Trefnydd and Chief Whip
First published:
14 July 2025
Last updated:
14 July 2025
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Our innovative and ground-breaking Basic Income for Care Leavers
in Wales pilot has provided 644 care-experienced young people in
Wales with a basic income of £1,600 per month, pre-tax, for up to
24 months after turning 18 years of age. It has generated, and
continues to generate, extensive interest globally, and I know my
colleagues in the Senedd remain keen to learn how the pilot has
progressed.
All but a few recipients have now received their final basic
income payments and concluded their participation in the
pilot.
The policy driver for this pilot was to support care leavers to
make a positive transition from local authority care, using basic
income as the means to achieve this. This direct investment in
care leavers further enhanced the investment that we already
provide to care leavers in Wales, such as Council Tax exemption
and the establishment of the St David's Day Fund, and we aimed
for basic income to give this cohort of young people the space to
thrive whilst securing their basic needs.
The delivery of this pilot would not have been possible without
the dedicated support of numerous professionals, particularly
those within local authority leaving care teams throughout Wales.
I wish to place on record my thanks to everyone who has
contributed to supporting the young people receiving the income
and who have collaborated with other key stakeholders across
Wales.
This statement marks the formal end of the pilot's delivery
stage, outlining the approaches to transitions from the pilot and
ongoing monitoring and evaluation.
Transitions from the pilot
Every recipient of basic income had their own individual
circumstances to consider throughout the pilot and as they
approached the transition out of the pilot.
Conscious that no two experiences would have been the same, we
worked with local authority leaving care teams, personal
advisors, care organisations and young people themselves to set
out a minimum standard for supporting the transition out of the
pilot. This approach built upon existing pathway planning, taking
the form of informed discussions between a recipient and their
Personal Advisor, with the first discussion recommended to take
place no later than six months prior to their scheduled exit from
the pilot.
Alongside this, we have been contacting all recipients when they
had six months, three months and one month remaining on the pilot
to remind them of their last scheduled payment date and to
encourage them to seek support in planning for the end of the
pilot.
Monitoring and Evaluation
Whilst the delivery stage of the pilot has finished, evaluation
activities continue with both recipients and their supporters and
will do so into 2027 when the final evaluation report will be
published. The independent evaluation, led by the Children's
Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE) at Cardiff
University with partners at the University of Oxford, the
University of York, King's College London, and Northumbria
University, has been underway since November 2022 and has
reported annually since 2024. As a result of evaluation
activities, we have rich early insights about young people's
experiences and a greater understanding of how the pilot was
implemented, published in the most recent annual report (March
2025). It is important to stress that we are at the midpoint of
the evaluation, and these early findings cannot be used to draw
conclusions around the impact of the pilot or provide a full
assessment of how it has been implemented.
The evaluation will consider a range of indicators of the impact
of the pilot on recipients and wider society, many of which will
only become clear after the pilot has ended. The evaluation is
complex and requires ongoing data collection and analysis to best
understand the full extent of the pilot's impact.
We intend to publish the final insights from our monitoring data
in August 2025. This data, generated through pilot management
information, has provided evidence about the pilot recipients as
the pilot progressed. The next annual evaluation report, due to
be published in early 2026, will include further insights from
pilot recipients about their experiences after the end of the
pilot. Further and final reporting in 2027 will present analysis
of the outcomes for pilot recipients and the economic impact of
the pilot on recipients and wider society, such as consideration
of value for money.
