Annual Broadband Delivery UK Administrative Costs Reach GBP5.9 Million

The government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office, which is responsible for overseeing the national and £1.2bn publicly funded roll-out of fixed line superfast broadband (25Mbps+) services to about 88% of people by the end of 2015 and 95% by 2017, spent £5.979m on admin costs in the last tax year (April 2012 – Late March 2013).

The latest data only reflects large administrative payments (above £25,000) made by BDUK as part of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and thus does not include smaller payments, mobile/spectrum related costs or any of the relevant grants to Local Authorities (LA).

Never the less £5.9m would appear to be more than the allocated BDUK budget of £3.8m for 2012-13 (here), although it’s roughly on par with the previous 2011-12 budget of £5.85 million. It should also be noted that BDUK has, in the last tax year, taken on responsibility for the £150m+ Urban Broadband Fund (i.e. “Super-Connected Cities“) project.

Last year it was revealed that £9.8m of the office’s budget (here) had been spent on 70 external consultants (May 2010 to September 2012) and the department suffered a staff turnover rate of 110% for three quarters (the rate at which an employer gains and loses employees). ISPreview.co.uk also published a related list of BDUK staff roles in November last year.

As usual most of the latest admin costs have gone towards international law firms (e.g. Pinsent Masons), recruitment/contract firms (e.g. Capita Resourcing), financial advisers (e.g. KPMG) and IT solutions providers (e.g. Atos). It’s obviously a lot of money but then government schemes always tend to attract a lot of paper work and BDUK’s legal costs are easily the biggest sink holes for their budget; those familiar with the scheme won’t be surprised by that.