We asked the Department why it had not just pressed ahead with the areas that it already knows are commercially unviable in the long term. It pointed us to Cumbria which had recently “been procured” and said that Cambridgeshire was also in the same batch. However, these are a small proportion of the UK and we asked what it was doing about the rest of the population. The Department told us that it was “absolutely not complacent”, and it was trying to ensure that it had a range of interventions in the programme so that it was clear with the market about where it is going to subsidise.67