BDUK Close Gigabit Broadband Vouchers for Newcastle and North Tyneside

The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has made a change this week that closes their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) for Newcastle and North Tyneside (Tyne and Wear), which means that local homes and businesses in poorly served rural areas can no longer apply for big grants to help get a much faster broadband ISP network installed.

Just to recap. The GBVS usually offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help rural premises get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed, which is available to areas with speeds of “less than 100Mbps” – assuming there are also no near-term plans for a gigabit deployment in the same area (either via private investment or state-aid). Local authorities sometimes also work with BDUK to boost the value of such vouchers for their region.

However, the GBVS has been operating with a very low level of UK availability for the past couple of years (i.e. it’s not currently available to most counties), which is largely to ensure that it avoids conflicting (i.e. duplicating public investment) with Project Gigabit’s larger Gigabit Infrastructure Subsidy (GIS) programme (i.e. the big build contracts that have been awarded to operators like Fibrus, Openreach, Wessex Internet and many more).

As a result of this, regions do sometimes drop into and out of voucher eligibility as Project Gigabit’s various GIS contracts and market reviews run their course. For example, rural parts of Devon in England were recently added back into the voucher scheme (here), which meant that poorly served homes and businesses in that county could apply for vouchers again.

The change this week is that poorly served homes in parts of Newcastle and North Tyneside have just been removed from the voucher scheme. But what’s interesting here is that this region doesn’t currently appear to have its own contract LOT under the GIS programme. However, back in 2023 it was briefly considered for one under Lot 38 (here).

The original Open Market Review (OMR) for this region estimated that, without public intervention, 71,441 premises were at risk of being left without access to gigabit-capable broadband. But it seems as if BDUK might still have greater plans than merely vouchers for this region, which may become clearer with the publication of their next UK progress update in the near future.

The GBVS is currently still available to poorly served parts of Derbyshire, Devon, the Isle of Wight, Greater London, Merseyside and Great Manchester, Birmingham and the Black Country.