Bromley Council Struggles to Match UK Government’s Rural Broadband Cash

The Bromley Borough Council in London is reportedly struggling to match an allocation of funding from the central UK Government, which could have otherwise been used to help expand the coverage of superfast broadband to residents of the rural Downe village, as well as Cudham, Keston and Chelsfield.

Apparently the Government has allocated £360,000 to help upgrade the relevant area and some other locations, which currently suffer from broadband download speeds of 2Mbps or less. But the local authority would have needed to more than match this by contributing £586,000 and that’s apparently a problem.

According to a council spokesperson (News Shopper), “Unfortunately we are currently unable to provide the significant level of funding to install super-fast broadband, which commercial broadband providers consider uneconomic to install for a relatively low number of residents in these challenging financial times. Further conversations are continuing with other organisations to see if additional non-Council funding can be accessed.”

Steve Barnes, Vice-Chairman of the Downe Residents Association, said:

“I have been campaigning for a year now with the intention of bringing superfast broadband to the villages.

Bromley Council have refused flatly because they say there are more important things to spend their money on. It’s disgraceful that Bromley can’t manage this. I don’t think they fully recognise the need for it, people are very frustrated. It’s not good enough.”

The issue affects around 3,000 residents and 1,000 businesses, although since no firm plan has yet been established to push superfast broadband (24Mbps+) coverage beyond the current 95% goal for the end of 2017 then councils still have some flexibility to focus on the more built up areas first. Such problems are especially challenging for rural areas, where the costs can sometimes be proportionally several times higher than in urban and semi-urban locations due to smaller population sizes.

In fairness the Government has established a £10m Innovation Fund with 7 pilot projects, which aims to “test innovative solutions to deliver superfast broadband services to the most difficult to reach areas“. But these are still being deployed and it won’t be possible to gauge their success until at least the end of this year.

The current Government intends to use these pilots in order to identify how much investment will be needed in order to plug the final 3-5% gap with superfast broadband, although the outcome of the imminent General Election could change all that.

At the same time there’s no guarantee, even if additional funding was made available to reach 100%, that local authorities would be able to match it and indeed some have already struggled to meet the existing Phase 2 BDUK allocations. Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting the Bromley news.