West Yorkshire Extends Business Broadband Vouchers to More Areas

After today’s Scotland expansion (here) we now have West Yorkshire (England) confirming that the Government’s Connection Voucher scheme, which offers grants worth up to £3,000 to help SME businesses in various cities across the UK to get a superfast broadband (30Mbps+) service, has been expanded to firms in Wakefield, Kirklees and Calderdale.

Previously the vouchers were only available to businesses within the Leeds and Bradford districts, but the new expansion means that 27,365 additional businesses across the area should now be eligible.

Incidentally Leeds and Bradford claim to have seen the UK’s highest take-up rates for the vouchers and this month became the first area outside London to issue more than 1,000 connection grants since the “Super-Connected Cities” programme was launched.

Mark Goldstone, head of business representation and policy at West & North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, said: “This is a huge boost to business in West Yorkshire, and means this transformational technology grant is now available to almost 80 per cent more firms than before. Superfast broadband is a business critical resource for many companies, and these vouchers take just minutes to apply for and don’t require any match funding.”

We’re currently attempting to find out from BDUK whether they can now confirm a full centralised list of the new areas that are set to be covered by the extended voucher scheme. This would be a lot easier than having to write a new story for every update that’s dripped out to the media.