Northumberland Council Get £2m Boost for Gigabit Broadband Vouchers

The Northumberland County Council (NCC) in England has confirmed that it will be able to commit an additional £2m (£0.556m in 2025-26 and £1.444m in 2026-27) to support broadband top-up vouchers (total budget of £3.5m). The aim is to help people in remote rural areas to get a gigabit speed internet connection installed. But there’s a catch.

The UK government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) typically offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help remote rural or poorly served urban homes and businesses get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) service installed, which is available to areas with speeds of “less than 1Gbps” – assuming there are no near-term plans for a gigabit deployment in the same area (either via private or state-aid funding).

However, the value of such vouchers can sometimes also be boosted by top-up funding from local authorities, which in the case of Northumberland means that eligible properties can potentially claim up to £7,000 per voucher. In addition, vouchers can also be combined within communities to help fund larger network builds.

In this case it appears as if NCC has secured an additional £2m of funding for their top-up voucher scheme from gainshare (clawback) funds received from BT (Openreach) via the previous Superfast Broadband Programme (SFBB) in the region. This reflects the return of public funding after the original network delivered a strong level of take-up.

The Council said they “achieved some of the highest take up rates in the UK” (around 75%) and have thus been in receipt of annual gainshare payments from BT in line with the contract terms.

NCC Statement

The demand for Top Up vouchers has increased considerably beyond the level that was predicted in 2023. This is due to the amount of voucher projects proposed by suppliers. To support this delivery the Top Up voucher funding budget needs to be increased by £2.000 million to meet this demand. This increased budget will be funded from gainshare funds received from BT which are set aside in the community broadband capital project in the capital programme which currently stands at £4.471 million.

In the 2024-25 financial year suppliers were already projecting a demand for vouchers which approaches the current £1.500 million committed funding. BDUK require that we have sufficient funds in place before they allocate vouchers to suppliers, even though vouchers may not actually be claimed for up to a year due to build times.

The figures show that a substantial proportion of draw down will not take place until the 2026-27 financial year. This is because BDUK allocates vouchers to suppliers up to 12 months in advance of funds being drawn down. Terms of Project Gigabit states that vouchers cannot be claimed until the fibre network is built and a service is ordered by the customer.

The catch is that the GBVS is currently only open to a limited number of areas across the United Kingdom for new projects. Sadly, Northumberland is not currently one of those, although today’s news may suggest that this status could soon to change. The funding could potentially also help with any pre-existing voucher-based deployments in the region (i.e. from before the local scheme was closed).

The government’s Building Digital UK agency often closes the GBVS (temporarily – but it can last awhile) when there’s a risk of it conflicting with Project Gigabit’s wider subsidised build contracts. At present, GoFibre holds the £7.3m deployment contract for North Northumberland (here), which aims to reach several thousand hard-to-reach premises in the region.