Autumn UK Budget 2025 Brings Little New for Broadband and Mobile

The Chancellor of the UK Government, Rachel Reeves MP, is today announcing her Autumn 2025 Budget (the OBR leaked it early) and there appears to be no current sign of anything significant or new for broadband and mobile infrastructure. In addition, there’s no indication that any of the recent calls for targeted business rates relief on digital infrastructure have been heeded.

Just to recap. The Government currently has two headline investment programmes for improving broadband and mobile – both managed by the Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency. The first is their £1bn industry-led Shared Rural Network (SRN) project, which committed each mobile operator to provide 4G data and voice coverage to 89.2% of the UK’s landmass by 31st January 2027 (this was revised down from 90% in July 2025).

The second is their £5bn Project Gigabit scheme, which aims to make 1000Mbps+ (gigabit) broadband speeds available to c.99% of UK premises by 2032 (revised down from 2030). Back in June 2025 the government confirmed that it would invest £1.9bn into broadband and mobile projects (this comes from existing commitments) until 2029/30 (2025 Spending Review) – largely reflecting the remaining funding from this Project.

Since then, the government has published their 10-Year UK Infrastructure Strategy (10YIS), which among other things confirmed a plan to “bring forward“ a more flexible permitting system (aka – flexi-permits) to boost street works across England and to ease the process of delivering gigabit broadband for leaseholders in multi-dwelling units / large residential buildings (background); albeit with limited detail about how this would be achieved.

Despite the positives, quite a few network operators and organisations have voiced concern over the potentially negative impact from tax rises in today’s budget, which often focus on the threat of rising business rates (here, here, here and here). Coming at a time when network operators are already under pressure from high interest rates, competition and rising build costs, BT (inc. Openreach) and Virgin Media have warned that a hike in business rates could force them to scale-back their network coverage plans.

Suffice to say that all eyes were on today’s autumn 2025 budget to see what sort of changes, if any, the government might make on the telecoms and digital infrastructure front. The bad news is that, at the time of writing, we haven’t seen any particularly big announcements for the sector or indications of a relief from the threat of a business rates hike.

What’s in the 2025 UK Budget?

In an extraordinary development, the now comically named Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) actually leaked full details of the budget ahead of time by publishing their ‘Economic and fiscal outlook‘ document “too early this morning“. This has since been removed and investigation launched. As a result, we’ve been able to skim that for any developments specifically related to broadband, mobile, telecoms and digital infrastructure, but at the time of writing have come up empty.

However, it’s still possible that the general Budget 2025 Summary document, once published, may contain some non-fiscal details related to telecoms and digital infrastructure that isn’t covered by the OBR and so we’ll update later once that has been published.

In fairness, the government is currently facing a difficult task, due to being extremely strapped for cash (a common issue over the past decade or more). This is largely due to the level of debt and related repayments that have accumulated in recent years.

The flexibility may thus not exist to do everything the industry might want. On the other hand, the government appears to be putting their own digital targets at risk by potentially applying too much tax to the sector and at a time when network operators are already struggling under existing pressures (see above).