Q41 Greg Clark: The funds committed by central government are in the region of £195 million to kick-start the initiative as I understand it. Why are they needed?
Mr Coates: First of all there is the very simple incentivisation point to encourage economies to think of new ways of doing things and one of the most successful ways of encouraging change is to provide funding to help that. More importantly, these things often require strategic change and major investment at the beginning of the process to allow, for example, land to be bought to build new facilities on. It is as simple as that.
Q42 Greg Clark: If it is for land for facilities to be built on, then it is not kick-starting, I assume that would be the case in any rollout of a LIFT.
Mr Coates: I accept that point, but I think the point I am trying to make is that when you have a new initiative you do tend to meet similar obstacles around why things cannot be done and one of them is that they do not have the money to do X, Y or Z. So we try to anticipate that by making sure money is available to help these changes happen.
Q43 Greg Clark: This is an important point about the sustainability, is it not? This is kick-start funding, then there may be a case to provide some funds to publicise it, to get people to know about it. If the funds are actually needed to buy the land to make it viable, then why can we assume that this will not be necessary in any future rollout of the programme?
Mr Coates: The wave we have just announced, the fourth wave, does include the same degree of enabling money as the first three waves. The thing which has changed, perhaps to get underneath your question, is that when we started the new LIFT initiative the tendency was to keep central funds for these things in terms of very large central budgets to facilitate change. Since then these budgets have now all been devolved out to the NHS and if similar programmes were envisaged we would expect local economies to fund much more of the enabling work and our money would be much more around the edges rather than the core of making things happen.
Q44 Greg Clark: You changed the terminology from "kick-starting" to "enabling". Does this accept that actually these programmes are going to need funding for the purchase at least of the sites on an ongoing basis?
Mr Coates: I personally do not see any difference between "kick-start" and "enabling".
Q45 Greg Clark: There is no difference between them.
Mr Coates: No. In my own terminology it is to make things happen.
Q46 Greg Clark: If it has been kick-started, it is now enabled and there is no reason at all for changing.
Mr Coates: I am sorry, I do not see a difference. In my terminology enabling money is a way of kick-starting initiatives.
Q47 Greg Clark: So it is all the same.
Mr Coates: Yes, in my terms.
Q48 Greg Clark: Does the kick-starting/enabling money continue then for the full rollout of the programmes as far as you see it or is it just for these early phases?
Mr Coates: Just the early phases.
Q49 Greg Clark: According to the Report you expect to get the money back.
Mr Coates: When we started the process we did reserve the right to take money back to prevent silly use of it all and unnecessary use of enabling money, but the reality is that only a very, very small amount of money had been taken back from the PCTs. The only one I am aware of is that £½ million was taken from Newcastle, who said they had no need for the money, and reallocated to Plymouth.
Q50 Greg Clark: How much money has been taken back so far?
Mr Coates: £½ million. That was re-allocated to Plymouth from Newcastle.