Eir Take BT to Court in £67m Damages Claim Over N.Ireland Contract UPDATE

Irish network operator Eir is taking BT (Openreach) to the High Court in London over a claim for damages worth £67m, which relates to a long-running dispute over the UK broadband giant’s Northern Ireland Public Sector Shared Network (NIPSSN) contract to provide connectivity services; the same one that attracted a £6.3m fine from Ofcom in 2020.

Just to recap. Back in December 2020 Ofcom fined BT (Openreach) £6.3m after they were found to have “failed to meet regulatory obligations” during a tender for the NIPSSN contract in 2017/18 (here) – valued at around £50m over 9 years (potentially rising to £400m via future changes to its scale and scope). That decision followed a complaint made by rival company Eir.

At the time, Ofcom said: “One of the possible solutions that could be used by the bidders for the contract was BT’s Fibre-to-the-Premises on Demand (FoD) [broadband] product. Our investigation has found that BT’s network arm broke our rules during this tender process, by failing to provide Eir with the same information about this FoD product – including its suitability and cost for delivering the relevant services – as it did to BT’s bid team.”

However, somewhat crucially, the regulator also added that they “do not believe that the breaches we have found were deliberate” and they did not make any findings on “whether this affected the outcome of the tender process“. But it sounds like that that last point will now have to be settled in London’s High Court.

According to the Irish News (credits to Anthony for the tip), Eir claims that Openreach discriminated against them by failing to provide it with relevant information in tendering for the NIPSSN contract. The case heard its opening remarks last Thursday and, from that point, is expected to last for a couple of weeks before the judge retires to make a decision (it’s unclear how long the latter will take).

A BT Group spokesperson told ISPreview:

“BT rejects eir’s claim. Our position is that we have no liability to eir and caused eir no loss in connection with the Northern Ireland Public Sector Shared Network tender in 2018.”

UPDATE 1:33pm

We’ve had a comment back from BT, which is added above.