The government is hoping that this will mobilise private sector resources behind flagship policies such as the Sustainable Communities Plan and the expansion of housing provision in the Thames Gateway, where 200,000 extra homes are planned by 2016.
It is understood that Richard McCarthy, the director-general of sustainable communities in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, is looking at how the LIFT template should be amended to suit the delivery of communities.
The LIFT programme was created as a way of expediting the delivery of primary healthcare facilities such as GPs surgeries and local clinics.
The government hopes the LIFT model will mobilise private sector resources behind flagship policies
It involved the creation of 42 Local Improvement Finance Trusts, which had the power to put a large number of clinics in a single package and offer it to a single contractor.
Each of the trusts was composed of three funding partners, with 60% of the money coming from the private sector, 20% from the Department of Health and a further 20% from Partnerships for Health. This last body was set up by Partnerships UK, the PFI quango.
Bevan Ashford, a law firm specialising in PFI, has been developing models of how a "sustainable communities LIFT" would work, and has concluded that they could be used to let large packages of work in the same way as the healthcare sector.
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