Welsh Government to Reopen ABC Broadband Vouchers this Spring

The Welsh Government (WG) has revealed that their Access Broadband Cymru (ABC) grant scheme is to “reopen” this spring 2025, albeit with some changes. The scheme previously offered funding to help rural homes get a faster broadband service installed in areas of slow connectivity, until it was paused last summer (here).

The long-running ABC scheme essentially offered vouchers (grants) to homes in poorly served areas that weren’t expected to benefit from either commercial or other state-aid funded deployment projects in the near future. By poorly served, we mean areas which didn’t have access to a “superfast connection” speed of 30Mbps+ (i.e. £400 for 10Mbps+ or £800 for 30Mbps+).

However, the ABC scheme was starting to look a bit outdated next to the UK government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband rollout programme, which has set a much more ambitious target – aiming to help extend 1000Mbps (download) capable broadband networks to reach “nationwide” UK coverage (c. 99%) by 2030 (currently at 86%+). The aim is to support this goal via a mix of bigger vouchers (Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme) and subsidised build contracts.

Suffice to say that the ABC scheme wasn’t just outdated, but it also risked conflicting with Project Gigabit’s efforts. Not to mention the 10Mbps broadband Universal Service Obligation (USO), but hardly anybody talks about that one any more and its impact has been very.. limited (here). Long story short, the ABC scheme required a bit of a re-think and ended up being paused by the WG.

WG Statement from August 2024

We are pausing the Access Broadband Cymru grant scheme from 7th August 2024.

The pause will allow us to:

– update the scheme to reflect new broadband technology and market changes
– review grant limits and how the scheme is run to keep it targeted, flexible, and responsive.

The pause should last no more than 6 months.

Applications received up to and including 6 August 2024 will be assessed and processed normally.

The good news is that Project Gigabit has since awarded a number of subsidised gigabit broadband roll-out contracts to Wales, which went to Openreach (here and here) and also sets the stage for ABC to return. The WG’s Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Energy and Planning, Rebecca Evans (MS), recently confirmed their plans to re-introduce the ABC scheme this spring, but offered very little in the way of detail.

Rebecca Evans (MS) said:

“Work on the updates to the Access Broadband Cymru scheme system is entering the final testing phase. I anticipate being able to provide more news on our plans to re-open the scheme to applications in the coming weeks.

We still anticipate that the scheme will reopen in the Spring.”

At this stage we don’t know quite what approach the WG will take. One option is to do as other local voucher schemes have done before and provide top-up funding to the UK’s government’s main gigabit voucher scheme, which tends to result in bigger vouchers that are able to help bring FTTP broadband into even more challenging areas.

However, the WG could instead opt to keep ABC more independent and technology neutral, which might result in smaller vouchers but still enable the ability to fund a wider array of technology neutral solutions (e.g. fixed wireless networks, Starlink satellites etc.). By the sounds of it, we should find out the answer sometime toward the end of this month or during April 2025.