North Yorkshire UK Looks to Wind Up NYNet 100 Broadband Company

The North Yorkshire Council (NYC) in England has proposed to wind-up the NYNet 100 company, which was originally created to help carry out procurement and contract management for the local authority’s Superfast North Yorkshire (SFNY) project. This has helped 201,000 premises in the rural county to access faster broadband over the last 15 years.

The original state-aid backed SFNY project awarded several contracts across four phases (valued at a total of £80.4m) – using different technologies (FTTC, FTTP, Fixed Wireless etc.) – to help expand the reach of “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+). Openreach and Quickline scooped up most of those. Local coverage of 30Mbps+ broadband now stands at 97%.

According to a recent report from the NYC (here), the contracted network operators have also repaid £27.58m in public subsidies to the council after proving strong take-up of the new broadband service post-deployment (aka – clawback/gainshare/overage). Some £8.279m of that has already been reinvested (e.g. extensions to existing contracts), but there is a balance of £19.3m that “remains available“.

“This funding belongs to NYC and is not fettered by terms and conditions although a previous commitment was given to BDUK that any balance would be used to promote “infrastructure” with digital infrastructure being a clear objective,” said the update.

Quite what will happen to that £19.3m in the future is unclear, although £1.65m of the overage balance is due to be used to “reimburse NYNet 100 for the costs of delivering Phase 1 of the SFNY programme” (closure of the company requires a clean set of accounts).

The SFNY programme has now been succeeded by the UK government controlled Project Gigabit scheme, which last year awarded the £73.5m state-aid supported roll-out contract for North Yorkshire (Lot 31) to Quickline (here). The aim of this is to help extend gigabit-capable broadband (1000Mbps+) to 36,300 hard-to-reach premises in the region. The roll-out began earlier this year and has so far covered over 2,000 premises (here).

However, all of this means that SFNY is now at the end of its life, which is why the council has also proposed to approve the winding-up of the wholly owned company NYNet 100 that was created to deliver the broadband programme.

Just to be clear, it’s NYNet 100 and not NYNet itself being wound-up. The County Council had already created NYNet as a company in order to aggregate broadband across the public sector, and there were “clear synergies resulting in the creation of NYNet 100” to help manage SFNY. This will still leave NYNet as a stand-alone wholly owned trading company.