Kirklees Council Names UK Telecoms Firms Behind “Defective” Civil Works

Telecoms and broadband companies including BT, Virgin Media and Cityfibre have been named and shamed by the Kirklees Council in West Yorkshire (England) after the local authority highlighted frustration at the rise in “defective” street works, which required the civil works to be re-done.

The council reports that in 2015 there were 189 jobs where they had to order utility companies to re-do reinstatement work and this has seen a sharp increase to 316 in 2016. A variety of utility companies are responsible for “defective” works like this (pavement damage etc.), although the local authority notes that most of the problems related to the work being done to improve telecoms and broadband connectivity.

The list of companies that have been ordered to fix shoddy civil engineering jobs includes BT, Northern Powergrid (Yorkshire), Yorkshire Water, Virgin Media, Northern Gas Networks, West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive, Falcrum Pipelines Ltd, T-Mobile (EE / BT) and CityFibre.

Kirklees Council Statement (Examiner)

“The increase in 2016 is mostly as a result of an increase in the number of utility works, which related mainly to an increase in broadband installation and upgrade.

In 2015 there were 10,210 new utility jobs reinstated; in 2016 there were 11,187 new utility jobs reinstated.”

All of this comes at a time when the council, much like so many other local authorities around the UK, is also dealing with a pot hole problem. So far some 23,744 pot holes have been repaired in 2017, which is up from 21,227 fixed during the whole of 2016 and 22,880 in 2015 (details). As the local authority says, it’s “a problem that is not helped in the current year by the increase in holes dug by the utilities.”

The situation is certainly no surprise because Virgin Media, BT and Cityfibre in particular have all been busy ploughing money into new superfast and ultrfast broadband networks. A lot of this work is being carried out by third-party contractors and naturally some of this won’t go quite according to plan, but the important thing is that the problems do generally get fixed. We’d expect a similar situation in other parts of the UK.

We should point out that Cityfibre completed the expansion of their 80km metro fibre optic Public Service Network (PSN) in Kirklees during January 2016 (here).