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Capital funding for the campus closure programme

The White Paper 'Our health, our care, our say' said that NHS residential accommodation for people with learning disabilities (NHS campuses) should be closed by 2010.  This programme of work has already begun in many parts of the country. There is further work to be done and the Department of Health is now providing some targeted support to meet the Government’s objective to move people with learning disabilities from NHS campuses to more appropriate accommodation in the community.

This is good news for those with a learning disability and their families and friends and for the NHS.

A total of £175m capital funding to help achieve this transition will be allocated to PCTs over three years 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10 in response to bids.

We are providing funding this year so that PCTs who have well developed closure plans can advance them during the current financial year and enable service users to move more quickly to appropriate housing. Capital funding can be made available to social landlords and others in the form of capital grants  to meet some of the housing, building and refurbishment costs associated with this re-provision, so long as the works are of a kind that would normally be capitalisable.

We are not, at this stage, specifying the proportion of capital costs that will be met through this central allocation because of the differences in needs of service user, variations across the country in housing costs, rents and other capital costs. We will however expect that some of the total expenditure will be met locally.