Gov Hails £22m Top-up for UK Rural Gigabit Broadband Vouchers

The UK Government has today announced that their Rural Gigabit Voucher scheme has been given a £22.2m top-up boost by a total of 17 local councils in England, which has increased the size of their vouchers and meant that more homes and businesses can now potentially get a 1Gbps capable broadband ISP network installed.

The existing £200m Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme is designed to help properties, particularly those in some of the most remote rural UK locations, to access significantly faster broadband. One part of that involves a voucher scheme, which normally offers up to £3,500 for small businesses or up to £1,500 for residents, to help them get an ultrafast or gigabit broadband connection installed (at present around a quarter of UK properties – 8 million premises – can access a gigabit service, albeit mostly in urban areas via commercial investment).

However, over the past few months the Welsh Government (here) and various councils across England (examples here and here), have announced that they intend to inject some of their own public funding in order to top-up the value of these vouchers. Bigger vouchers are good because they make faster broadband available to locations where it might otherwise still be too expensive to deploy.

For example, an additional investment of £1m in Dorset means that the maximum funding per voucher for homes has jumped to £2,500 (an extra £1,000), while the maximum funding per voucher for businesses will increase to £6,000 (an extra £2,500). Across England this means that 250,000 homes and businesses are now eligible for the boosted funding via 17 local councils.

Summary of Top-up Schemes in England

* The speed which must not currently be available at an address in order to qualify for a voucher/top-up. For instance, the main GBVS is available to anyone who can’t access 100Mbps. In County Durham you would also qualify for the Durham top-up if you can’t access 30Mbps. In Shropshire everyone who qualifies for the main GBVS voucher will also qualify for the top-up because the speed threshold is the same.

** In Kent, new housing less than three years old is not eligible for increased values compared to GBVS. Kent’s top-up budget includes a £2m boost to the £2.8m top-up which was announced in September 2019.

The UK Government are also now in discussions with the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, as well as other local councils in England, about the potential and approach for gigabit schemes there, although it’s not yet known what the outcome of those talks will be.

Matt Warman, UK Minister for Digital Infrastructure, said:

“This government is determined to connect every home and business to the fastest broadband speeds available from the Highlands to the Jurassic Coast.

But we can only do this with collaboration at a local and national level so I’m delighted English councils have committed to pump more money into our voucher scheme to help rural communities get gigabit speed broadband.

A quarter of all properties across the UK can now access these fast and reliable speeds, and we have earmarked a further £5 billion so rural towns and villages across the four nations can get the speeds they need to seize all the benefits of new technology.”

So far nearly 45,000 gigabit broadband vouchers, worth more than £90 million, have already been issued and there is more than £70 million worth of vouchers on offer immediately to “take companies and residents in rural towns and villages out of the digital slow lane” (apply here).

The current scheme is supplier-led, although the Government are also in the process of piloting a consumer-led approach across Cornwall, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire, Cumbria, Northumberland and the Borderlands (here), which could help to boost connectivity by making community demand much more visible to potential suppliers.

We should point out that the Government’s forthcoming commitment of £5bn under the Outside-In F20 programme also looks as if it will include additional voucher funding. This is focused on helping those in the final 20% of hardest to reach premises and forms part of a wider pledge to ensure that “gigabit-capable broadband” (via full fibre, DOCSIS, 5G or fixed wireless etc.) reaches every UK home by the end of 2025 (here).

We already have some idea how this new programme will work (here), but the Government recently appeared to water it down to only “go as far as we possibly can by 2025” (here).