Government Appoints Interim Chair of Building Digital UK Agency
The new Labour-led Government (DSIT) has this afternoon announced that they’ve appointed Hazel Hobbs to act as the “interim” chair of their broadband and mobile centric Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, starting on 1st September 2024. She replaces Simon Blagden, who resigned “with immediate effect“ a month ago (here).
Hazel has also been reappointed as a non-executive director of BDUK, having been a member of the Board since the organisation became an executive agency in March 2022. She will serve as interim Chair whilst an exercise is launched to recruit a permanent Chair.
Hazel previously chaired BDUK’s Audit and Risk Committee. Her wider experience includes being former job-share Director at the Government Digital Service where she led on implementing the transformation strategy for digital government and championed innovation to bring modern, digital services to every community in the UK. Hazel is also an Associate at the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) and leads assurance reviews of the highest profile major projects in government.
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Hazel Hobbs said:
“I’m delighted to have been appointed as BDUK’s interim Chair and will continue working with DSIT, the Board and Chief Executive to drive forward the Government’s commitment to achieve full gigabit coverage by 2030.
As a citizen, independent business director and parent, I know how critical our work is to power economic growth and ensure nowhere is left behind. My priority will be to build on the hard work and brilliant foundations established by BDUK staff and prepare for the forthcoming Spending Review.
We remain focused on collaborative working with the telecommunications industry and devolved governments to secure fast, effective and good value digital infrastructure for the taxpayer.”
The Labour Party’s recent 2024 General Election Manifesto (here) made clear that they would be making a “renewed push to fulfil the ambition of full gigabit and national 5G coverage by 2030,” which is partly being supported by reform of the existing planning framework. But other than that they’ve mostly been keeping continuity with the previous government’s programmes and targets (Project Gigabit, SRN etc.).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Lucky they’ve appointed somebody with relevant telecoms knowledge!
Correction, oops they haven’t.
The legal knowledge will be critical to clean up the industry.
Just like pretty much all the Minister positions, virtually none have any experience running anything resembling a business
According to its latest annual report, BDUK costs the taxpayer nearly £100 million a year. What has it delivered that the infrastructure companies would not have delivered anyway?
There’s an element of chicken and the egg here, since the market and related regulation/legislation has changed a lot since c.2010 and that has bred more competition over time. But most do seem to agree that public investment into improving national broadband infrastructure – often in rural areas (locations that private investment tends to struggle with) – has been one of the easiest cases to make.
At present it’s still too early to assess Project Gigabit, but there are plenty of economic studies of the prior Superfast Broadband Programme to be found, such as this one:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2021/10/bduk-publish-new-evaluation-of-uk-superfast-broadband-project.html
I thought Andy Conibere of Trooli gave quite a balanced view of BDUK in his interview with Richard Tang last week. It is well worth a watch here:-
https://youtu.be/-HeKgrCBrbU?t=3