UK Business Broadband Vouchers Extended to 4 More Cities in Scotland

The Government’s Connection Voucher scheme, which offers grants worth between £200 and £3,000 to help small and medium sized businesses in any of 22 cities across the United Kingdom to get a superfast broadband (30Mbps+) service installed, has today been extended to four additional cities in Scotland.

The voucher scheme, which had initially showed low uptake before improving towards the end of 2014 thanks to extra promotion and greater flexibility, was originally due to end in March 2015. But the Government recently decided to add an extra £40m to the pot (total funding of approximately £140m) and extend it until March 2016 (here).

Part of this extension also involved making the vouchers available to more cities from April 2015 and today we learnt that the first of these will benefit the Scottish cities of Glasgow, Inverness, Stirling and Dundee (currently only businesses in Edinburgh, Perth and Aberdeen can make use of the vouchers). In other words 26 cities will soon benefit.

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander MP (LibDem), will announce the move today and say, “For many businesses across Scotland and the UK, high-speed broadband isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity … It is extremely frustrating that some small businesses in cities can’t get the broadband connection they need. These vouchers will help them to change that.”

It should be said that, unless we hear otherwise, additional cities in other parts of the United Kingdom are also likely to be announced in the not too distant future (before the end of Q1 2015).