Cheshire UK Council Demand All New Build Houses Get Fast Broadband

The Cheshire East Council looks set to become the latest local authority in England to require that all new build residential and business premises be constructed with support for “state of the art high-speed Internet connectivity“, which will apparently constitute “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+).

The issue of new builds and broadband connectivity is nothing new, indeed we’ve recently covered several situations in which residents of new builds have been left with slow or sometimes even no broadband connectivity at all (examples here, here and here).

On the flip side a forthcoming EU requirement means that, from 2017 onwards, all new builds will need to be “high-speed broadband ready“. But the Home Builders Federation, whose members in England and Wales deliver around 80% of the new homes each year, has already warned that such a policy could “seriously damage” future construction (here) and at a time when the Government wants to build many thousands of extra homes.

One of the problems highlighted by the HBF concerns the lack of viable telecoms infrastructure, such as in remote rural areas where the Broadband Delivery UK programme has yet to benefit. Dave Mitchell, Technical Director of the HBF, said: “What can I as a homebuilder do about it? If service providers don’t meet that deadline, where can I go? If I’m buying land and say to Openreach, ‘have broadband ready by then,’ and they don’t, does that mean I have to get planning permission?”

By comparison the other school of thought says that home builders should be prepared to spend a bit more and work with utility companies in order to ensure that adequate infrastructure and capacity is built, although at present this may only be viable for larger projects.

However the Government’s Communications Minister, Ed Vaizey, recently wrote to UK local authorities (here) and called upon them to ponder broadband capability as “a material consideration when determining planning applications“. The Cheltenham Borough Council in Gloucestershire (England) is already set to adopt a similar approach (here) and now Cheshire East Council seems to be following.

Caroline Simpson, Council Director of Economic Growth, said:

“The Council has acted to ensure all new developments should deliver future-proofed infrastructure and communications systems.

We will encourage developers to work with broadband providers to ensure that future occupants have access to the best possible connectivity – and by insisting this is installed at the building stage, when it is more logical and cost-effective, rather than having to retro-fit a property at some later date.

This is another good example of the Council putting residents first and planning sensibly and innovatively for the future.”

Crucially the Cheshire East Council aims to make faster broadband a requirement for planning consent during 2015, well over a year ahead of the new EU rules. As such it’s conceivable that there could still be problems with implementation, not least because the local Connecting Cheshire project with BT won’t complete until summer 2017 and even then some premises might not be within reach of a viable service (here).

It’s easy to tell a local authority what it should be doing and for that authority to then tell house builders, but not all construction firms are utility and telecoms experts and where should the line be drawn with regards to project size (e.g. you wouldn’t spend tens of thousands to run fibre for a single remote house etc.)?

Equally it will be important to quantify precisely what type of connectivity would be allowable, as otherwise we can see some home builders using inferior Satellite solutions as an easy way to cheat. Hopefully local authorities will be wise to that when judging such applications. Similarly a lot of the language focuses on making the house superfast capable, but this isn’t much help if the local area has no viable infrastructure to supply it.

Ultimately the rules will change and if you are building hundreds of new homes then don’t be surprised if in the near future councils start paying closer attention to details like broadband connectivity. We just hope they remember that many smaller schemes will still be reliant on what operators like BTOpenreach have put in the ground, or not.