Shropshire Seek to Encourage Better Broadband for New Build Houses

The Shropshire County Council is considering the introduction of an accreditation scheme for new build home developments, which would act like a checklist for planning officers and applicants in order to help “highlight the qualitative aspects of schemes that sometimes get missed,” such as the need for broadband.

At present the local state aid funded Connecting Shropshire project is already working with Openreach (BT) and Airband in order to ensure that 98% of homes and businesses across the county can order a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) capable ISP network by 2021 (here). But keeping up with the ever rising growth of new build properties doesn’t make this any easier.

The project’s latest update also notes that they “regularly receive enquiries from owners of properties on new housing developments asking when we’ll be providing their new home with access to superfast broadband. The simple answer, generally speaking, is that we won’t. This is because we don’t have State Aid approval to invest public funding in improving access to broadband in new postcode areas.”

Instead the update threw the weight of responsibility back to developers by saying that it is “not unreasonable to expect the developers to include superfast broadband in their on-site infrastructure, and many do. However, in some cases, people buy homes and expect that broadband will be provided, only to be disappointed once they move in.”

Meanwhile new home buyers are merely told to “check the availability of superfast broadband” before they buy, which doesn’t always work as new build addresses often aren’t recognised by availability checkers. Plus you can’t always trust the property developer to tell you the truth about what will exist at completion (make sure to get what they promise in writing).

Connecting Shropshire Statement

In 2016, before Connecting Shropshire went out to tender for Contract 3, we carried out an Open Market Review. Under this process, broadband infrastructure suppliers were sent lists of premises on the Ordnance Survey AddressBase. The data only included homes that had been built and registered at that time.

It is not unreasonable to expect the developers to include superfast broadband in their on-site infrastructure, and many do. However, in some cases, people buy homes and expect that broadband will be provided, only to be disappointed once they move in. Buyers of any property, new or old, are strongly recommended to check the availability of superfast broadband, if it is important to them, before they buy.

Chris Taylor, Connecting Shropshire’s Programme Manager, has separately added (here) that currently “there is no UK law that forces developers to provide superfast broadband in the homes that they build,” which is half right. In fact most new developments have been required, since the start of 2017 (here), to ensure that they’re “equipped with a high-speed-ready in-building physical infrastructure, up to the network termination points.”

Sadly including support for such infrastructure (e.g. building spare cable ducts) is only half the battle. The property developer still needs to find a network operator who will actually make use of what they’ve built, which doesn’t always happen.

The situation has at least improved quite a bit and one recent study noted that the majority of new builds were now being equipped with superfast or better broadband connectivity (here). This is partly thanks to UK government pressure, which has helped to encourage Openreach, Virgin Media and others to work more closely with property developers.

The Government has also been encouraging local authorities to factor the need for good broadband into their planning approval process since 2015 (here), which is being formalised a bit more through the National Planning Policy Framework. This is likely to be where Shropshire’s checklist idea stems from, even though other councils have been doing something similar for the past couple of years.

Most recently the new Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review (FTIR) has also suggested that the Government will try to “guarantee” full fibre connections to new build developments (i.e. changes to streamline wayleaves and mandate fibre connections), although this won’t help anybody who may be struggling with such a problem today.