England Councils Report Warns of Gigabit Broadband Divide

The County Councils Network (CCN), which is a cross-party special interest group of the Local Government Association (LGA) – representing 36 of England’s councils, has published a new report that warns of a growing divide in “gigabit-capable broadband” (1Gbps) coverage between urban cities and the “rural shires“.

According to the ‘Levelling Up Digital Connectivity in Counties‘ report (using data from Ofcom), the Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) currently expects around 68% of the country to be covered by a gigabit speed network by the end of 2021. But the report notes that just 21% of premises in “county areas” currently have access to such services.

Indeed, ten counties currently have less than 15% gigabit coverage – Cumbria, Dorset, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Northumberland, Shropshire, Somerset, and Surrey. Such county areas are lagging far behind London, which has 77% gigabit coverage, and large towns and cities in the North and the West Midlands, which have on average 51% coverage.

None of this should come as any great surprise because, so far, most of the fixed line deployments of gigabit-capable broadband networks only began (at a large scale) around 3 years ago and have largely come from commercial builds, which naturally almost always focus on the most economically viable urban areas first. This is how it always goes.

The latest data from Thinkbroadband estimates that 27% of properties can access a gigabit speed service via Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology, but much of the recently rapid growth in coverage has actually come from Virgin Media’s almost completed DOCSIS 3.1 upgrade of their existing Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) lines. Together this brings gigabit coverage to 57% today and, with VMO2’s rollout due to finish by the end of 2021, we may well see that reach c.65% within the next couple of months.

The Project Gigabit Challenge

By comparison, the Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit, which aims to try and correct the problem by focusing public investment toward the final 20% of hardest to reach (predominantly rural) areas, has only recently left the drawing board. As part of that, its first contracts won’t even begin to be awarded until around mid-2022 (i.e. the first builds under this might not happen until late 2022 or early 2023).

As we said earlier, the CCN report doesn’t say anything particularly new or surprising.

Peter Aldous MP, Chairman of the County All-Party Parliamentary Group, said:

“Like heating and water, an internet connection has increasingly become a necessary utility for households, with the pandemic making digital an even more vital part of our everyday lives. In committing to giving 85% of the country access to gigabit speeds by 2025, the government recognises this and has made broadband one of its flagship policies.

Whilst progress in connectivity has been rapid since 2019, much of this has been focused on London and the major cities so far, and there is a real risk that county areas are once again the poor relation in internet speeds unless the government urgently prioritises county areas.

If the government’s levelling-up and economic recovery efforts are to be successful, providing fast and reliable broadband must be part of the equation. It is vital that this investment reaches left-behind county areas, and local county authorities stand ready to work with government on the rollout.”

The full report includes a series of fairly generalised recommendations, which cover a lot of areas where the Government and Ofcom are already working on improvements to existing policy (e.g. updating the Building Regulations and Electronic Communications Code etc.). We also see another call for “subsidised digital access for Universal Credit recipients” (i.e. a regulated social broadband tariff).

However, some of these ideas might fall on deaf ears. For example, the call to put “upper-tier councils” in charge of Project Gigabit funding, for their respective areas, overlooks part of the reason why Building Digital UK chose to centralise the new programme within DCMS – precisely to avoid the delays (e.g. Devon and Somerset) that occurred with local authority administered schemes under the prior Superfast Broadband (SFBB) programme.

Recommendations

1. with other parts of the country seeing a rapid increase in gigabit connectivity since 2019, government should now ramp up investment for county areas, and and prioritise those places so their gigabit accessibility rates can begin to catch up with the major cities and other parts of England.

2. the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities engage with the local government sector to consider what regulatory or legislative changes need to be made to ensure that broadband connections are included as standard in new developments and that the network is future proofed.

3. the Department for Work and Pensions assess whether it is possible to put in place a scheme providing subsidised digital access for Universal Credit recipients, to assist them with job-hunting and to meet the obligations required of them.

4. BDUK continue to work closely with county and unitary councils in the delivery of Project Gigabit and prioritise rollout in county areas using existing knowledge and expertise acquired from the national Better Broadband Programme

5. BDUK works to ensure its procurement processes are of sufficient scale for contracts to successfully meet the needs of the rural communities BDUK are aiming to support.

6. as part of the forthcoming suite of powers available to county authorities in devolution deals, the devolution of local digital infrastructure budgets – including subsidies – to make them the responsibility of upper-tier councils should be available in every devolution deal, if the local authority wished to take on that responsibility.

7. government should extend strategic planning powers to counties to join-up development with digital infrastructure provision that will meet residents’ needs.

8. the government considers what legislation it could put in place to secure access to land for the purpose of laying broadband cabling where the landowner is resistant.