Cumbria Confirm GBP2.5M Reinvestment Boost for Superfast Broadband

The Connecting Cumbria project, which is currently aiming to roll-out “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services with BT to 95% of local premises by around mid-2018, has become the next Broadband Delivery UK scheme to confirm a clawback (gain share) linked reinvestment boost of £2.5 million.

We suspect this kind of news is going to become quite repetitive as each council doles out updates individually, so we’ll keep it short. Last week the Government confirmed that take-up of related connections in BDUK project areas had been stronger than expected and this activated the clawback mechanism ahead of schedule (here).

Clawback essentially requires BT to return part of the investment (currently worth up to £129m across the United Kingdom) when local take-up of the new service passes beyond the 20% mark. The money that gets returned can then be used to further improve network coverage.

Councillor David Southward said:

“This money is a bit like a reward for delivering superfast fibre broadband on track and on time and surpassing the original expectations on how many people will be signing up to fibre. It looks like we’re going to burst through that 20 per cent take-up figure into around a third of properties, so BDUK are allowing us to reinvest even more money into getting to more of the hardest to reach properties.”

Apparently Cumbria’s slice of this is £2.5m (here), which isn’t surprising as local take-up was already at 17.3% in March 2015 (here). Quite how it will be spent remains to be seen, although it could be folded into the local Superfast Extension Programme / BDUK Phase 2 contract (here).