BDUK Updates on Project Gigabit Broadband Contract for Cheshire UK

The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency recently provided a small but useful update on their stalled £43m (public subsidy) Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for Cheshire (Lot 17), which was originally held by Freedom Fibre until they “mutually agreed to terminate” it in March 2025 (here). But Openreach (BT) may now be set to take it on.

Just to recap. The contract for Cheshire (England) was originally valued at £43m (public subsidy) and aimed to extend gigabit-capable broadband connectivity to cover 15,000 premises in hard-to-reach areas, including villages like Kingswood, Allostock, Minshull Vernon and beyond. But this was sent into limbo after the contracted supplier, Freedom Fibre, suddenly pulled out just as the build phase was supposed to start.

At the time a spokesperson for BDUK told ISPreview that they were “now moving swiftly to put in place alternative plans with other suppliers to connect premises that were due to be connected. Freedom Fibre has not received any public funding for this contract“. Since then, we’ve been patiently waiting for an update on the plan for Cheshire (Lot 17) and the first clue came in an easily overlooked update to one of the contract’s old documents.

According to a recent update to the old Cheshire Public Review Closure Notice document, BDUK has since put the intervention area through an “alternative procurement under the Type C regional framework as part of call off 8” (details of this contract haven’t yet been published). We initially overlooked this last week because it had been inserted into the middle of some older paragraphs (credits to one of our readers, Peter, for spotting).

Just to give this some context. Openreach currently holds the existing Single Supplier Framework agreement with BDUK (here) – valued at c.£1.2bn, which is focused on Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements (no other suppliers currently tackle Type C). This reflects remote areas where no or no appropriate market interest had previously been expressed before to BDUK, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior procurement. Such areas are often skipped due to being too expensive (difficult) for smaller suppliers to tackle.

A similar thing happened to the Project Gigabit contract for Mid West Shropshire (Lot 25.01) last year, which saw Voneus drop out. Openreach eventually ended up securing the intervention area for Lot 25.01 and merging that into their existing call-off 3 contract (here).

Suffice to say that the mention of Type C and Call Off 8 together would strongly point to Openreach being the preferred bidder for Cheshire, although ISPreview understands that BDUK are still reviewing the bid and nothing has been formally awarded. Openreach declined to comment, and we are awaiting BDUK’s response.