Scotland Boosts Rural Broadband Vouchers by Linking to UK

The Scottish Government has today linked their new Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme (SBVS) to the UK’s Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme in order to significantly boost the value of their vouchers, which expands the pot up to £8,500 for SMEs and up to £6,500 for homes.

Previously, the SBVS provided funding of up to £5,000 to help premises not in scope of either the R100 contracts, or planned commercial investment, to get a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) service installed in areas where ISPs may not ordinarily go.

Smaller “interim vouchers” of up to £400 were also made available for premises where 30Mbps+ is planned for after the end of 2021 – with an additional £250 for those in the hardest-to-reach areas (seemingly intended to help cover for the LOT 1 delays under R100). Sadly, there’s no mention of these in today’s announcement.

However, by linking the SBVS and RGC, the Scottish Government will benefit from being able to offer significantly larger vouchers, which are now worth up to £8,500 for businesses and up to £6,500 for homes. Bigger vouchers are good because they make faster broadband available to locations where it might otherwise still be too expensive to deploy (especially when several are aggregated together).

Matt Warman, UK Minister for Digital Infrastructure, said:

“This government is determined to connect every home and business to the fastest broadband available. Our new deal with the Scottish Government unlocks extra funding to help rural communities benefit from gigabit-capable connections.

A quarter of all properties across the UK can now access these faster speeds and with more collaboration like this at a local and national level, we will see even more rural towns and villages staking their claim to these next-generation speeds.”

Paul Wheelhouse, Scotland’s Connectivity Minister, said:

“We have been working closely with the UK Government to join up our respective funds and processes to maximise the impact of our respective voucher schemes across Scotland to add to progress achieved under the Digital Scotland Superfast Programme and augment our investment through our £600 million R100 programme. This collaboration will ensure that

more people, communities and businesses in the hardest-to-reach areas in Scotland are able to access maximum funding available for better broadband.”

At the time of writing Scotland’s SBVS page doesn’t appear to have been updated to reflect the change, but we assume that will follow in the very near future. Otherwise the move comes as almost £6 million for fibre optic broadband across part of the Tay Cities Region is being released through the UK Government’s Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) programme.

The first part of the project has seen £2.9m of UK government funding being awarded to BT (Openreach) to connect more than 150 public sector sites (e.g. schools, libraries and other public buildings) in Angus and Perth & Kinross to “gigabit-speed broadband.” This will be followed by further procurements to be completed shortly, which will release £2m to connect around 40 public sites in Dundee and £1m for 30 in Perth & Kinross.

The Tay Cities project is part of a strategy to bring gigabit-capable connections to publicly owned and community buildings so they can act as full fibre “hubs” (anchor tenants), which could in the future help to expand FTTP services to surrounding homes and businesses via private investment.