Written Statement: Basic Income for Care Leavers in Wales pilot – Update (July 2025)

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.