Government Name 100 England Towns Set for Faster Broadband Boost

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)