Building Digital UK Agency to Change CEO in 2026 as Dean Creamer Exits
The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) organisation, which has responsibility for delivering gigabit broadband and better mobile connectivity across the nation (e.g. the £5bn Project Gigabit and Shared Rural Network schemes), have confirmed that existing boss (CEO) Dean Creamer is to be moved into a new role – his last day will be 9th January 2026.
The move comes after the government announced (here) that BDUK, which under the previous government became an executive agency in April 2022 (here), had been integrated back into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT); this followed an earlier review of all Arm’s Length Bodies (ALBs) – also known as quangos.
Dean Creamer (CBE) officially became the CEO of BDUK back in September 2023. But it’s stated that he’s now been asked, and agreed, to help support the reset of HS2 (High-Speed 2) as Director General of the Major Rail Projects Group in the Department for Transport (DfT). A formal recruitment process is currently underway to find his replacement.
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In the meantime, Ben Whitestone, BDUK’s Interim Chief Operating Officer (COO), has agreed to be Interim CEO at BDUK until a new CEO is found. In a brief statement to suppliers, BDUK said they were “sorry to see Dean go“, but added that he “leaves the directorate and its programmes in an excellent position, and we hope you’ll join BDUK in wishing Dean every success in his new role. Please be reassured that BDUK’s commitment to the programmes and the mission remains as strong as ever“.
The latest update also mentions that Shropshire (England) has been removed from eligibility under the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS), which follows Openreach taking on part of the county within its Type C contracts (here).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Reeves has been re-integrating arms-length agencies back into the Whitehall blob as part of her initiative to reduce costs and red tape. Why then does the BD need either a CEO or a COO?
Further, once the integration has been completed, there will be even less transparency as to exactly how much of the claimed funding is actually spent by the BDO.
Why not abolish BDUK and other bureaucratic agencies and use the money saved to reduce taxes on the broadband providers thus encouraging them to invest?
@Optimist:
The BDUK is intended to facilitate deployments that are not otherwise financially viable.
Tax breaks give (relatively speaking) piddling amounts of money to companies. They are normally short term, but the investment payback period can be double or triple the period that tax breaks run.
Specific tax breaks, such as the initial 5-year business rates relief on new fibre infrastructure, saved the fttp industry around £60 million, which is minuscule compared with the billions needed to build to hard-to-fibre areas. And the areas that aren’t hard to fibre are already commercially attractive and so don’t need tax breaks, which if offered would likely just make the easy-to-fibre areas even more attractive at the expense of building into hard-to-fibre areas.
Corporate tax breaks on general business investment are also not often effective, with new investment not even breaking even compared with the lost tax revenue in many cases.
However, BDUK-assigned funds cover the full cost of what is actually built. And don’t forget, even when altnets get BDUK contracts to run fibre to the uneconomic areas there are some altnets who then don’t use those funds.
Investment-centric tax breaks are effective and efficient when the retained funds can cover the required investment costs. Schemes such as BDO are, however, reliant upon general taxation and are thus subject to political whim. Funding schemes from general taxation are also inefficient because up to 15% of the value of the funds will be consumed by the bureaucracy.