Ed Vaizey Dodges Question on 2018 Superfast Broadband Rollout Delay

During an interesting exchange in the House of Commons today the Government’s Communications Minister, Ed Vaizey, successfully managed to dodge a question about the likelihood of the Government’s 95% superfast broadband (24Mbps+) coverage target, which is due to complete by 2017, seemingly slipping into 2018 or possibly later.

The news of a potential delay won’t come as much of a surprise to many ISPreview.co.uk readers, not least because many of the first Phase 2 Broadband Delivery UK contracts to be signed under the related £250m Superfast Extension Programme (SEP) have pointed to post-2017 dates.

For example, the Northamptonshire contract suggests that 95% will be achieved locally by September 2018 (here) and a separate deal for Hampshire puts the date even further back at “mid 2019 or earlier” (here). Admittedly there are still many contracts left to sign and not forgetting that 95% could be taken as an average across the whole of the UK, but a trend is already showing and recent comments from BT appear to support this (as echoed in today’s questions below).

House of Commons Debate (15th Jan 2015)

John Robertson (Labour MP for Glasgow North West):
Superfast broadband seems to be a popular topic today. Does the Minister agree with the BT group strategy, policy and portfolio director that getting superfast broadband to 95% of the country might take until 2018? This was stated in an answer from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on 3 December. The gap between superfast broadband availability—73%—and take-up is 21%, so there is a shortfall of 52%. Does the Minister agree that superfast broadband might be priced just a little too high? What is he doing to close the gap between the 21% and the 73%?

Chris Bryant (Labour MP for Rhondda):
Absolutely nothing.

Mr Vaizey (Comms Minister, Conservative MP for Didcot and Wantage):
I do enjoy the running commentary that we get from the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) throughout questions. Like the Duracell bunny, will he ever run out of energy? It is really impressive.

In this country we have some of the lowest costs for superfast broadband, but I know that the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (John Robertson), along with the hon. Member for Rhondda, will welcome our fantastic advertising campaign for superfast broadband, which I hope will bridge the gap between availability and take-up.

In fairness we wouldn’t wish to make a mountain out of a mole hill. At this stage slipping from a 2017 completion target to a few months into 2018 wouldn’t be the end of the world for such a complex national deployment and crucially the costs haven’t run out of control like they have in many other big Government schemes. In other words, so far as Government projects go, it could easily have been worse (timescale / cost wise).

Part of the reason for that stems from the risk-averse decision by local authorities and Government to pick the so-called safe bet of BT for their BDUK contracts, albeit possibly in some areas at the cost of other schemes that might have produced better / faster connectivity and coverage.

At this point it’s worth remembering that the original BDUK target was to ensure that superfast broadband could reach 90% of people in each UK local authority area by the end of 2015, which some suggest is still achievable even if many related projects and the DCMS itself are officially predicting a slip into 2016 (initially they said “early 2016,” but now they’re playing it safe with simply “by 2016“).

We’ll know for sure how close the project will be to its original target by around the end of this year, although it would have been nice of Mr Vaizey to comment the 95% delay concerns.