BDUK Tweak Connect Fibre’s Derbyshire Project Gigabit Broadband Rollout

The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has tweaked alternative network ISP Connect Fibre’s (Fibre Assets) Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for Derbyshire (LOT 3) in England again. The contract now has a reduced “total scope” of reaching 12,876 hard-to-reach premises via a public subsidy £34.64m.

The contract, which was first announced back in December 2023 (here), originally aimed to cover an additional 17,000+ premises and was valued at £33m. But it’s important to remember that such contracts are not static and their scope, as well as committed levels of public funding, can change over time for a number of different reasons – informed by regular reviews of existing UK deployment plans.

For example, commercial operators may expand or reduce their roll-out plans in the same region(s), which can reduce or grow the scope for public investment within those same contracted areas. The contracted operator could also find the deployment to be more expensive, or possibly even cheaper, than previously envisaged.

Adjustments like this may occur due to changes in build costs and interest rates / inflation, as well as any unexpected obstacles to street works or greater efficiencies of build than planned or expected. Suffice to say, there can be various reasons why the contracted scope of related builds and the level of allocated public funding may change over time.

The latest contract modification was made after BDUK accounted for one of their recent Open Market Reviews (OMR), which are periodically run every few months in order to assess existing roll-out plans over the next c.3 years.

BDUK description of the modifications

Nature and extent of the modifications (with indication of possible earlier changes to the contract):

Net decrease of £364,100 in subsidy for the removal of:

411 premises from Initial Scope Drawdown 1;

745 premises from Deferred Scope Drawdown 1; and

4,619 premises from Deferred Scope Drawdown 2.

New total scope 12,876 and total subsidy £34,647,455.

According to the latest June 2026 data from BDUK (here), Connect Fibre has so far only managed to complete the build for 1,200 premises in Derbyshire out of 13,290 contracted (not yet updated to reflect the above change), which is fairly slow-going given that the contract was first awarded all the way back at the end of 2023 and this figure hasn’t increased for a few months now.

The usual catch is that there may be further changes in the future, which could go in a different direction. So, it’s not always easy to tell what the final picture will be until you actually reach the end of the contracted build.