Gloucestershire UK Working to Boost Rural Broadband Grants

The Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) in England appears to be making progress on their plans to introduce a series of new digital and broadband grant schemes across the county, which will aim to help connect those who live in areas that currently lack access to “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) connectivity.

At present, the Gloucestershire County Council already works in partnership with Herefordshire Council through the joint Fastershire project to address the challenges of broadband availability across both counties. But at the end of last year, the GCC took the decision to adopt an approach to awarding additional broadband grants that would be more consistent with Herefordshire Council.

The change actually reflected three key decisions to boost existing broadband grants, add a new grant for businesses and to launch a new Digital Household Grant for those who can’t get faster speeds via a fixed line broadband solution (i.e. 4G based mobile broadband connectivity).

Gloucestershire’s Broadband Grant Changes

1. Approve an increase in the maximum financial threshold of the existing Fastershire Community Grant Scheme from £5,000 per premise to £7,000 per household premise with download speeds under 30Mbps during the period 1 January 2023 until 31 August 2023.

2. Approve the creation of a new Fastershire Business Grant scheme during the period 1 January 2023 until 31 August 2023 to support business premises with download speeds under 30Mbps. The maximum grant will be £20,000 per qualifying business premise where there is a 20% match funding contribution from the business.

3. Approve the creation of a new Gloucestershire Digital Household Grant scheme to support residential properties with download speeds under 30Mbps that are unable to apply for the Fastershire Community Grant. This new grant will support improved digital connectivity based on 4G technology by supplying and installing a 4G Directional Antenna and the external 4G router.

The first two already appear to be active, while the council seems to have only this month put out a tender to find a supplier for their new Digital Household Grant scheme to manage the “supply and installation of 4G Routers and Antenna” to recipients of the grant (here). The programme, once live, is expected to run for 2-years and will be implemented in phases.

As we understand it, the first phase of the new grant scheme will focus its support to include the 1,187 premises that were “transferred out” of Gigaclear’s rural Fastershire FTTP broadband rollout contracts: Lot 2/3c [Forest of Dean] – South Herefordshire and Gloucestershire (west of the River Severn). Phase 2 would then open the scheme to any qualifying households across the county. A total of 5,699 premises would qualify for this grant.

The 4G scheme should perhaps be seen as somewhat of a stop-gap solution, which clashes a bit with the 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO), but should still help to fill the void until the Government’s £5bn rural Project Gigabit broadband rollout scheme. However, a recent update suggests that the Project Gigabit solution for South Gloucestershire may take a bit longer, as it requires a special Cross-Regional Supplier Framework to be established (here).

Finally, within Gloucestershire, the Fastershire project has £1.01m allocated for grant support in 2022/23 and 2023/24, although this is expected to increase as BT returns more public investment under the clawback clause for prior broadband contracts (i.e. public investment gets returned as take-up of the new infrastructure rises).