At the end of July the UK Government announced that part of their new £3.6bn Towns Fund would go toward supporting an initial 100 towns “so that they will get the improved transport and improved broadband connectivity that they need” (here). The names of those towns, which includes a few cities, have today been published.
In our original report we speculated the the additional funding could be used to support Boris Johnson‘s (Prime Minister) pledge to have “fantastic full fibre [FTTP] broadband sprouting in every household” by 2025 (currently coverage is over 8% of the UK), although he is yet to detail how such a seemingly unachievable date can be met.
Unfortunately the latest update doesn’t shed any new light on how the broadband side of this new investment will work or be used. Current state aid rules may also place some restrictions upon it, although by the sounds of it the Government are leaving this decision up to local authorities.
In any case each town/city looks set to receive up to £25 million and we suspect that most of that will be eaten up by improvements to local transport infrastructure, which seems unlikely to leave much left over for broadband.
Robert Jenrick MP, Local Government Secretary, said:
“Ensuring that prosperity and opportunities are available to everyone in this country, not just those in London or our biggest cities, is at the heart of the mission of this government.
We want to level-up our great towns, raising living standards and ensuring they can thrive with transformative investment in transport, technology, skills and culture.
I will now work with local people from the 100 communities announced today to agree proposals to invest up to £25 million in each place. I hope these deals will provide the investment and the impetus for long-term renewal ensuring each town can look to the future with a new optimism.”
Many of the towns on the list already have good access to superfast and sometimes even ultrafast broadband ISP infrastructure, while some of them also have significant rollout plans underway for new Gigabit capable full fibre networks by commercial operators (e.g. Bournemouth) like Cityfibre, Virgin Media and / or Openreach (BT).
However we can certainly perceive of the new funding being used in a similar way to the existing Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) programme, such as by building new fibre optic networks to upgrade connectivity for public sites and then making that network available (open access wholesale) for commercial operators to extend out into local homes and businesses.
Hopefully we’ll get a better idea next year after the towns have had a chance to debate their plans for the additional funding. The government will also soon publish a prospectus to guide towns through the process and set eligibility criteria for funding, which may give us some more hints.
We should point out that further towns are likely to be added to this list in the future, so this won’t be the last announcement.
Town Fund – The First 100 Towns (September 2019)
Town | Local Authority |
Barrow-in-Furness | Barrow-in-Furness |
Bedford | Bedford |
Birkenhead | Wirral |
Bishop Auckland | County Durham |
Blackpool | Blackpool |
Bloxwich | Walsall |
Blyth (Northumberland) | Northumberland |
Bolton | Bolton |
Boston | Boston |
Bournemouth | Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole |
Bridgwater | Sedgemoor |
Brighouse | Calderdale |
Burton upon Trent | East Staffordshire |
Camborne | Cornwall |
Carlisle | Carlisle |
Castleford | Wakefield |
Cheadle (Greater Manchester) | Stockport |
Clay Cross | North East Derbyshire |
Cleator Moor | Copeland |
Colchester | Colchester |
Corby | Corby |
Crawley | Crawley |
Crewe | Cheshire East |
Darlington | Darlington |
Darwen | Blackburn with Darwen |
Dewsbury | Kirklees |
Doncaster | Doncaster |
Dudley | Sandwell |
Glastonbury | Mendip |
Goldthorpe | Barnsley |
Goole | East Riding of Yorkshire |
Grays | Thurrock |
Great Yarmouth | Great Yarmouth |
Grimsby | North East Lincolnshire |
Harlow | Harlow |
Hartlepool | Hartlepool |
Hastings | Hastings |
Hereford | Herefordshire |
Ipswich | Ipswich |
Keighley and Shipley | Bradford |
Kidsgrove | Newcastle-under-Lyme |
King’s Lynn | King’s Lynn and West Norfolk |
Kirkby-in-Ashfield | Ashfield |
Leyland | Chorley |
Lincoln | Lincoln |
Long Eaton | Erewash |
Loughborough | Charnwood |
Lowestoft | East Suffolk |
Mablethorpe | East Lindsey |
Mansfield | Mansfield |
Margate | Thanet |
Middlesbrough | Middlesbrough |
Millom | Copeland |
Milton Keynes | Milton Keynes |
Morley | Leeds |
Nelson (Lancashire) | Pendle |
Newark-on-Trent | Newark and Sherwood |
Newcastle-under-Lyme | Newcastle-under-Lyme |
Newhaven (East Sussex) | Lewes |
Northampton | Northampton |
Norwich | Broadland |
Nuneaton | Nuneaton and Bedworth |
Oldham | Oldham |
Penzance | Cornwall |
Peterborough | Peterborough |
Preston | Preston |
Redcar | Redcar and Cleveland |
Redditch | Redditch |
Rochdale | Rochdale |
Rotherham | Rotherham |
Rowley Regis | Sandwell |
Runcorn | Halton |
Scarborough | Scarborough |
Scunthorpe | North Lincolnshire |
Skegness | East Lindsey |
Smethwick | Sandwell |
Southport | Sefton |
St Helens (Merseyside) | St. Helens |
St Ives (Cornwall) | Cornwall |
Stainforth (South Yorkshire) | Doncaster |
Stapleford (Nottinghamshire) | Broxtowe |
Staveley (Derbyshire) | Chesterfield |
Stevenage | North Hertfordshire |
Stocksbridge | Sheffield |
Sutton in Ashfield | Ashfield |
Swindon | Swindon |
Telford | Telford and Wrekin |
Thornaby-on-Tees | Stockton-on-Tees |
Tilbury | Thurrock |
Todmorden | Calderdale |
Torquay | Torbay |
Truro | Cornwall |
Wakefield | Leeds |
Walsall | Walsall |
Warrington | Warrington |
West Bromwich | Sandwell |
Whitby | Scarborough |
Wolverhampton | Wolverhampton |
Worcester | Worcester |
Workington | Allerdale |
Kettering misses out again whilst the rest of Northamptonshire seems to get it
Not quite Rollers. No Rushden, no Daventry, no Raunds, no Wellingborough. Just Northampton and Corby
Ban the private car and boost the broadband. That’d be a good sustainable deal.
Well I’m amazed Scarborough appears on the list. Here’s hoping for FTTP.
As always nothing in Kent
Guess you didn’t see Margate then?
Margate doesn’t count. That’s in Thanet. lol
I suspect the money for carlisle is not going to be used for broadband (as such) but for road infrastructure as there’s been a big song and dance here about a southern bypass.
https://www.itv.com/news/border/2019-02-14/102m-for-carlisles-new-bypass-and-10-000-homes/
I could of course be totally wrong as its hard to tell if openreach are doing things here as there is some sort of storage yard in carlisle that’s always full of their vans/trucks and a lot of G.fast pods have appeared around the city, not on my cab tho of course 🙁
Use the wholesale ope reach checker and you will find from the first roundabout for Carlisle into town there are fibre to the premise nodes on virtually every telegraph pole, take physical look you be surprised
London road? Interesting will have to look. Thanks
Swindon is on the list but which part ?
Dorset and Somerset both absent. Nice.
Nothing in Gloucestershire either. And I’m surprised to see Swindon in the list, I thought they were pretty well covered by superfast broadband.
Glastonbury is in Somerset and Bournemouth is in Dorset
Robert Jenrick is MP for Newark-on-trent.
Nice co-incidence.
Any idea when more information on what exactly that means per town listed in terms of funds? £25m could dent most of the commercial FTTP premises in most of those towns but when split with the other projects, especially transport… I wonder if there’ll be any left tbh.
Loughborough?
Leicestershire essentially doesn’t exist in the minds of the government.
No surprises that more money to be spent where the telecoms companies will get the biggest returns.
Still no mention of how they intend to solve the rural, semi rural and EO line problems.
Nothing in Devon …bah humbug.
No Birmingham or Solihull only Wolverhampton, Walsall and Dudley. We are all in the West Midlands.
I wouldn’t of expected Hastings to be on the list!
No Feltham (London) on the List
Wish fttp was in my area in welwyn garden city ye I get virgin media but still it’s annoyed me that thay rolled out 500mbps and I cant get that were over the road thay can talk about alinateing the user base
Holy moly.
Bedford AND Milton Keynes.
About time!
Wait!!! a tiny little town Like Rowley Regis which already has 500mb Virgin and up to 330mb Gfast is on the list???
DUDLEY IS NOT IN SANDWELL.
DUDLEY is a bougth on its own!!!!!!
Thurrock is that good apparently it had to be on there twice…
Typical that Northfleet or Gravesend isn’t on the list, yet right over from us (Essex) have a couple of towns that are included.
No Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland. Thanks Tories.
Lincoln’ on the list twice get in. Double internet for me in a million more years