Devon and Somerset UK Struggle to Match Broadband Funding

The joint £94 million Connecting Devon and Somerset project in England, which is currently rolling out BT’s superfast broadband (25Mbps+) network to at least 90% of local premises by the end of 2016, is seeking a delay and reduction in the additional funding allocated by the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office.

Earlier this year BDUK announced the tentative allocation of another £250 million (aka – Superfast Extension Programme) to help lift the fixed-line superfast broadband coverage target from its original goal (reaching 90% of people in each local authority area by the end of 2015) to 95% by 2017 (here). Since then councils across the United Kingdom have been working to update and adapt their existing plans.

As part of this extension the CDS scheme was allocated an additional £22.75 million, which as usual needs to be matched by both the local authorities involved and their chosen supplier (this is most likely to end up being BT again). The extra funding would help CDS to achieve or at least get closer to their long-term goal of 100% superfast broadband coverage by 2020 (i.e. matching the EU’s Digital Agenda target).

Like most local authorities the CDS scheme has been given until the end of June 2014 to finalise their bid, but there have been a few bumps along the way. In particular some local councilors, such as the MP for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), have called for a cut in the funding amount (easier to match in the current economic climate) and a delay in order to give them more time to present their bid.

A DCMS/BDUK Spokesperson said (Western Morning News):

“It’s understandable that they would take time to work up a proposal.”

Problems like this are not altogether unexpected and we’ve previously reported on a couple of similar cases. The CDS scheme is also quite big and being bigger means more complicated to assess. However BDUK has previously proven to be quite flexible with such situations, which leads us to believe that the current difficulties aren’t likely to represent a significant stumbling block for the project, although the final investment total may not be as high as currently proposed.