Worcestershire UK Councillors Row over Money for Broadband Advertising

The Government’s recent move to launch a major multi-million pound advertising campaign in order to raise awareness about superfast broadband availability under the national Broadband Delivery UK programme (here) appears to have angered some opposition councillors in Worcestershire (England).

One of the problems that the BDUK scheme has had to contend with is a lack of awareness for the new service, with many people often incorrectly assuming they’re not already covered by the connectivity and thus not even contemplating a subscription.

As a result the Government’s advertising project, which is also being encouraged at a local authority level, was setup to help raise awareness and thus boost take-up. This can also have a positive impact upon the claw-back mechanism, which allows some of the investment to be returned and reinvested into adding further coverage once a certain percentage of take-up (usually 20%) has been achieved.

One county that has adopted this approach at a more local level is Worcestershire, which has earmarked another £272,000 to help manage and promote the new service. But not everybody is happy with this idea and the County Hall’s Labour group is particularly opposed (you can really start to smell the coming General Election).

Councillor Peter McDonald, Labour Group Leader, said:

“So far the council has contributed £8.5 million to the total cost of £20 million to provide superfast broadband to what is a minority of residents in the county. Not satisfied with spending £8.5 million for a private company to expand it has spent £272,500 promoting a private company through advertising and giving support to the programme.

The amount spent on advertising and supporting the product of a private company is eye watering. While vital services are being cutback and in some cases gone forever this council is putting the interests of a private company before vital services.”

The counter argument to this is of course that by promoting the service you will encourage reinvestment to occur sooner rather than later. On top of that most of the promotional work so far has tended to reflect the connectivity options offered from a large swathe of independent ISPs and not just BT.

Naturally the Deputy Council Leader, Simon Geraghty, has rebuffed the criticism as “misleading” and countered that it is “an excellent example of the public and private sector investing and working together to enable a next generation broadband network across Worcestershire and to drive economic growth” (here).

Meanwhile it should of course be remembered that other factors can impact take-up too, such as the higher prices of related services, consumers being locked into an existing contract for over a year (i.e. not able to switch yet) and not to mention a lack of desire or need for the product itself (especially if the consumer is already happy with what they have).

At the same time the roll-out itself is of course on-going and thus new areas are constantly being added to the coverage, which means that even if it’s not available to you today then, as the Government moves towards 95% coverage by 2017, there’s a good chance that it will still arrive in the future.