Essex UK Council Starts £1.88m Digital and Broadband Project

The Essex County Council in England has this week launched its new £1.88m Digital Essex programme – part of the wider Digital Strategy for Essex (here), which among other things will develop a “local grant scheme” to provide additional funding to reach the final 1% of rural premises that still cannot access “decent broadband“.

At present the existing Superfast Essex project is already said to be “on track” to reach 99% of all premises in Essex with “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) connectivity by 2023 (the remaining part is actually being delivered using gigabit-capable FTTP). But this is still expected to leave around 8,000 premises in very hard-to-reach areas of the county with poor broadband speeds and no current upgrade plans.

Based on known activity (e.g. commercial build and other schemes), it is expected that, by 2023, around 80% of Essex premises will also have access to gigabit-capable broadband speeds. This means that to reach the national target of 85% coverage, effective public intervention will be needed over the next 4 years to reach at least a further 5% of Essex with gigabit speeds.

On top of that, the local authority will also seek to reach near 100% coverage of 4G mobile and complement this with 5G coverage of over 50% by 2025. In addition, they also want 5G services to be made available to all key employment locations and in identified priority areas.

Much as we reported earlier this year, many of the commitments in the council’s strategy seem to be broadly aligned with those of the UK Government’s existing programmes, particularly their £5bn Project Gigabit broadband scheme and the £1bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) deployment for 4G. Commercial deployments will also help to deliver it.

In that sense, it’s unclear precisely what the council itself will be doing to help deliver on all of this and to boost local skills, save for this week’s vague mention of a new local grant scheme.

Cllr Lesley Wagland OBE, ECC Member for Economic Renewal, Infrastructure and Planning, said:

“This funding will help to ensure that no individual or business is excluded from digital opportunities due to lack of infrastructure, affordable access, equipment, or skills.

Enabling people to build the skills they need to be part of the business recovery is key to a stronger economy for the future. That’s why it’s so important for us to give our residents the confidence to take advantage of digital services and employment opportunities.”

At present we don’t yet know what kind of grant scheme the local authority has in mind, but it wouldn’t surprise us if they mirrored other councils by offering to top-up funding provided by the Government’s ongoing Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (i.e. vouchers with bigger values can be used to deploy faster broadband deeper into rural communities). Otherwise, this week’s announcement is more sound bites than substance.