Aylesbury Vale Broadband Fallout Claims Scalps of Senior Councillors

The troubled Aylesbury Vale Broadband project in Buckinghamshire, which was supported by Aylesbury Vale District Council via a £1.44m publicly funded commercial loan before being sold to UK ISP Gigaclear, last night contributed to the resignation of AVDC’s Leader, Neil Blake, as well as his wife (Cllr Janet Blake).

The AVB scheme, which was controlled by AVDC (95% shareholder and most of its directors also worked for the council), originally set out to deploy a “full fibre” (FTTP/H) ultrafast broadband network to cover several rural villages in the heavily rural Aylesbury Vale area. But good intentions don’t always make for the best approach.

Unfortunately the project ran into difficulties (here) with the potential overbuild of rival networks (e.g. Gigaclear’s FTTP was targeting some of the same areas, while a couple of fixed wireless ISPs were already present in certain parts) and other concerns also emerged over performance, deployment delays, long-term financial viability, the departure of a key Managing Director (Andrew Mills) and the status of subscriber deposits.

In December 2017 a deal was finally reached that resulted in the sale of AVB’s network assets to Gigaclear (here), which in turn pledged to support and continue the local rollout. Despite all this the council’s leadership continued to hail AVB as a “success,” which was put into sharp context after the Audit Committee published its report earlier this month and laid bare many of the project’s mistakes (here).

The council has since accepted the Audit Committee’s report and the matter was due to be discussed again at 7pm last night during an extraordinary meeting of the council (here). Ahead of that event Cllr Janet Blake, who has also been under pressure after she voted on a planning application for a developer where she had a financial interest, took the decision to resign from her cabinet post.

Shortly after that it was announced that her husband and AVDC’s Leader, Neil Blake, had similarly resigned from his position (seemingly related to AVB).

AVDC Statement

Councillor Neil Blake has today resigned as Leader of Aylesbury Vale District Council.

In accordance with the council’s Constitution the Deputy Chairman, Councillor Angela Macpherson, will discharge the functions of the Leader until such time as a new Leader is elected by Council.

Meanwhile Gigaclear have already committed to “completing the network builds” by end of September (Q3 2018) in Stewkley, Oving, Drayton Parslow and Swanbourne (this should cover the “majority of residents” in these areas), although taking on another network’s assets can be complicated and we wouldn’t be surprised if that slipped a bit. Apparently they will then start evaluating other areas in the vale for a future deployment.

However a big question mark still remains over the council’s future liabilities after their sale to Gigaclear. In cash terms, the Council has already been found to have made a net loss of £185,495 on its investment in AVB but this could still rise by the end of 2018 if Gigaclear finds that all was not quite as promised.