BDUK Accepting Councils to Gigabit Voucher Top-Up Scheme Again

After a delay that was caused by a data backlog regarding previous voucher schemes, the Government’s (DCMS) Building Digital UK team have confirmed that they are now actively onboarding local councils that are interested in setting up a top-up boost for their £210m rural gigabit broadband voucher scheme.

At this point it’s probably fair to say that the gigabit voucher scheme has had a rocky 2021, which partly stems from difficulties experienced during the transition phase that occurred after the end of the prior £200m Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) scheme in March 2021 and the start of the new £210m follow-on scheme (the latter forms part of the wider £5bn Project Gigabit programme).

One aspect that suffered was the top-up scheme, which is where local authorities (councils, devolved governments etc.) put in some of their own public funding to help boost the value of vouchers. At the start of August 2021 it was revealed that many UK LAs had pumped an extra £26m into the voucher scheme (here), often doubling the value of local vouchers – bigger vouchers make it possible to reach increasingly remote rural areas.

At the time, we noted that many councils were missing from the list, including some that had previously informed us they wanted to join, but were struggling to make much progress. The situation has made it difficult for some gigabit voucher projects to proceed, which has left them stuck in limbo.

Sources close to the issue recently enabled ISPreview.co.uk to confirm that this was caused by a data backlog from the previous voucher scheme, which meant that BDUK were not in a position to set up new top-up voucher schemes (beyond those they’d just announced).

However, BDUK informs us that they’ve made significant progress since August and have worked through the backlog, which means they’re now actively onboarding local councils that are interested in setting up new top-up arrangements. So far, all local authorities and devolved administrations with existing top-up schemes who indicated that they wished to continue, and were ready to move to the new scheme, have now been migrated.

The priority was to migrate existing top-up arrangements, but talks are understood to be ongoing to onboard new local authorities who did not have existing top-up schemes, particularly those that have expressed an interest in joining (e.g. Cheshire). We understand that BDUK are now aiming to onboard those later this year.