2019 Conservative Manifesto Reiterates £5bn Gigabit Broadband Plan

The UK Conservative Party has today published their own Manifesto for the 12th December 2019 General Election, which naturally repeats their existing pledges to cover the whole of the UK with “gigabit-capable” broadband services by 2025 and to spend £5bn on helping to reach those in the hardest to reach (final 20%) of areas.

One of the advantages – or disadvantages (depending upon your perspective) – of being the party of Government is that people often go into a General Election with a better idea of what you’d actually aim to deliver and how. In that sense the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has already revealed quite a few plans for his future policy and today’s manifesto largely echoes those.

The headline items are of course that pledge, funded by extra public investment of £5bn, to ensure that “every home and business” has access to a “full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband” service by the end of 2025 (here).

On top of that they’ve also vaguely promised to “provide greater mobile coverage across the country,” which we take as a thin reference to the recent £1bn industry-led agreement on mobile coverage (here). The aim of that is to extend geographic 4G coverage to 95% by the end of 2025 (the Government will put £500m into this).

2019 Conservative Manifesto Statement

If this Conservative Government is returned to office, we will have an infrastructure revolution for this country. Now is the time to invest in Northern Powerhouse Rail, and the Midlands Rail Hub, and so many more projects, as well as a massive programme of improvements for our roads and gigabit broadband for every home and business.

Connecting the UK is not just about transport. We are Europe’s technology capital, producing start-ups and success stories at a dazzling pace. But not everyone can share the benefits. We intend to bring full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025.

We know how difficult it will be, so we have announced a raft of legislative changes to accelerate progress and £5 billion of new public funding to connect premises which are not commercially viable.

We have already analysed the aforementioned commitments before and so won’t be repeating ourselves (see links above), although on the whole the 2025 pledge for broadband still looks very optimistic (hard to say without seeing more detail as they seem set to include 5G, as well as Virgin Media’s cable network, alongside FTTP/H); albeit nowhere near as unrealistic as Boris’ original “full fibre” for all by 2025 plan.

A big question mark also exists over that £5bn funding pledge, which again is hard to judge without more detail on their delivery strategy. The lack of clarity over what this means for the rollout of “full fibre” (i.e. will it ever reach every home and if so, by when?) is another somewhat galling point.

By comparison the industry-led mobile plan seems more concrete (thanks to being fleshed out and supported by the industry), at least provided operators have their feet held to the fire on any delays. Ofcom will apparently be able to impose significant fines if they don’t.

The manifesto also promises to launch a review to “explore how we can better support the self-employed. That includes improving their access to finance and credit (not least mortgages), making the tax system easier to navigate, and examining how better broadband can boost home working,” which doesn’t at this time provide much to bite into.

Arguably one of the toughest things for the party to sell – in terms of digital connectivity – will be the Government’s approach to internet regulation, which if handled poorly (not uncommon for politicians on telecoms matters) carries an increased risk of serious harm from overzealous internet censorship. On the other hand plenty of ordinary people think that what some folk say online can easily go too far, although controlling the vibrancy of human thought is rather dicey (see Russia, China and Iran for examples).

2019 Conservative Manifesto Statement

We will legislate to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online – protecting children from online abuse and harms, protecting the most vulnerable from accessing harmful content, and ensuring there is no safe space for terrorists to hide online – but at the same time defending freedom of expression and in particular recognising and defending the invaluable role of a free press.

Also, given how the online world is moving, the Gambling Act is increasingly becoming an analogue law in a digital age. We will review it, with a particular focus on tackling issues around loot boxes and credit card misuse.

We already covered this as part of our earlier summary on the Online Harms White Paper (here), which noted that tackling areas like hate speech, conspiracy theories and fake news is very subjective (context is king) and that is excruciatingly difficult for internet companies or automated filtering systems to correctly judge. The Online Harms Bill will also include the endlessly delayed internet porn block via age verification (here), which many view as a privacy nightmare.

Admittedly this election is about much more than broadband (Brexit is the dominant topic) and as such issues of internet connectivity or regulation will inevitably be significant less important to voters this time around than in previous such events.