Ofcom Sets Out Current Progress and Future Plans to UK Prime Minister

The UK telecoms, media and internet content regulator, Ofcom, has this week written to the Prime Minister (Keir Starmer), Chancellor of the Exchequer (Rachel Reeves) and Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Peter Kyle), among others, to update them on how its work is “contributing to innovation, investment and growth in the UK“.

The new Open Letter is said to cover both Ofcom’s achievements since this time last year and what’s coming over the year ahead, which reflects everything from their approach to fixed broadband, mobile connectivity and online safety, to spectrum sharing, satellite regulation and TV / video streaming etc.

The letter itself doesn’t really say anything that we haven’t covered before through a variety of different articles over the past year, although some people may find the added context that it delivers to be useful, so we’ve published it in full below.

Ofcom said they remain “committed to promoting economic growth and will continue to engage with Government on this matter“. Now, if only they could format their letters with more readily sized paragraphs, to avoid the TL;DR wall of text effect.

Ofcom’s Open Letter to the Government (19th Jan 2026)

Dear Prime Minister, Chancellor,

In January 2025, Ofcom set out our approach to contributing to economic growth across the UK, capturing our longer-term vision for pro-growth regulation, enabled by competition, innovation and investment. A year on, this letter provides an update on the commitments we made then, and sets out what we are doing in 2026 to further enable growth across the UK. It also sets out how we are streamlining and reducing burdens on industry to allow focus on innovation and investment, to support the Government’s commitment to reduce regulatory burdens by 25%. Finally, it sets out how we approach areas where Government and Parliament have consciously established new regulation which is crucial to the safety and security of the UK – such as online safety, security and resilience.

Investment in mobile and broadband infrastructure and connectivity

Driving investment in fibre networks is critical for the reliable, high-speed connectivity that we need to underpin productivity across every sector of the UK economy. In 2021, Ofcom set out a new ten- year framework for economic regulation of fixed networks which was designed to drive significant new investment in fibre broadband, to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure for the future. We consciously chose to drive this by opening up competition to Openreach, to maximise innovation, choice and competitive prices for consumers and businesses. Over the past five years our regulatory approach has enabled billions of pounds of investment in new networks, with full-fibre coverage now available at 78% of UK households, compared to just 6% in 2018. At the same time as rapid coverage improvements, the competition we have generated means full-fibre broadband prices have been falling in real terms, so customers are getting better services for less at a time when the cost of living is so critical for so many households. Analysis in our most recent pricing report shows that, including promotional discounts, the average monthly price available to new residential customers signing up to a standalone full-fibre broadband service fell by 41% in real terms, to £36, in the three years to September 2024. In light of pressures on household budgets, we are working closely with DSIT to ensure that pricing is fair for consumers. In February, we will publish our next report with data on switching, consumers’ confidence in navigating the market and the prices of telecoms services.

2026 marks the midpoint in that ten-year strategy. In line with our commitments in the Government’s Regulatory Action Plan last year, we published a consultation on our approach to the next five-year period in March 2025. We will publish the final statement in March this year, setting the rules until 2031 to provide certainty and stability for investors and underpin the final phase of the UK’s full-fibre build.

People and businesses in the UK expect to be connected where they need, and when they need, which is why we are also prioritising improvements in mobile connectivity. We want consumers to have the tools they need to navigate the market and choose mobile providers based on quality, not just price, encouraging providers to compete on performance and invest in better networks. In March 2025, we committed to overhauling the data consumers can access on mobile coverage and quality by delivering the first phase of our new webchecker, Map Your Mobile. We launched this in June 2025, with new features in November 2025. More than half a million people have used Map Your Mobile so far and further improvements are planned during 2026. We also provided support to the CMA in its review of the Vodafone/Three merger last year, the outcome of which has resulted in the companies making a public commitment to invest £11 billion over an eight-year period, which will significantly improve the performance and capacity of their network. More immediate benefits are being felt by consumers, with the integration delivering faster 4G speeds for 7 million people, as well as a removal of a total of 16,500 sq/km of not-spots in the UK.

Action to deliver further improvements and investment in mobile connectivity requires coordination between government, local authorities and industry as well as the regulator. We will set out later this year our view on what more can be done, and are committed to providing better data and evidence, which will help decision-makers deliver improved outcomes for consumers.

Releasing highly valuable spectrum for innovation and growth

Wireless connectivity requires access to spectrum, which Ofcom manages for the UK. Last year, we made a number of commitments to drive economic growth and innovation by opening up the airwaves to new ways of connecting people and businesses.

First, we committed to consult on enabling satellite direct-to-device (D2D) services. Following consultation, we confirmed in December 2025 that we will authorise the use of most mobile spectrum bands for satellite D2D services. Our decision means the UK will be the first country in Western Europe where mobile operators can team up with satellite companies to allow standard smartphones to receive a signal from space. This will provide connectivity to areas of the country that are not covered by terrestrial mobile networks, bringing social and economic benefits in these areas.

In 2025, we continued our broader work to enable satellite services to support growth and connectivity across the UK, including through authorising satellite broadband providers such as Starlink and Amazon Leo. We have authorised 9 non-geostationary satellite orbit licences so far and take up of these services continues to increase, with over 110,000 active connections in 2025, up from around 87,000 in 2024.

We also committed to and completed the auction of very high frequency mmWave spectrum for use by mobile network operators in October 2025. This will support better connectivity in congested areas such as transport hubs and stadiums.

We are also enabling greater spectrum sharing to extract the maximum benefit for the UK from valuable airwaves:

• We committed to opening up shared access licensing to high-capacity mmWave spectrum for private networks. Businesses such as the automotive industry and busy ports can access this spectrum through a self-service online tool launched in April
• We have published our decision to enable Wi-Fi and mobile services to share the 6 GHz band, helping to meet the future demand for data by increasing capacity for everyday use in busy places like train stations as well as for newer technologies like virtual reality and AI. This makes the UK the first country in Europe to commit to these two different technologies sharing this spectrum.

In the coming year, we are focusing on making spectrum available for new services and technologies. This includes a consultation on updating spectrum rules in response to the growing use of drones in Summer 2026, and decisions on expanding spectrum for satellite broadband on planes and ships, and innovative wireless broadband solutions for Wi-Fi, by the end of the year. Finally, we continue to support innovation and trial licences for spectrum with over 730 such licences in 2025.

Supporting the health and commercial future of UK TV and radio

The UK has one of the most successful creative sectors in the world, with our Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs) playing a particularly pivotal role in that ecosystem, and forming an important part of UK culture. The UK’s commercial TV and online video sector recorded revenues of £17.1bn in 2024. To support the thriving creative economy, Ofcom is implementing the Media Act 2024. This updates regulation for the digital and streaming age so that audiences can continue to enjoy the incredible range of programming, journalism and services offered by the UK’s broadcasting and media landscape. Large parts of this work were completed in 2025 as we promised last year. We have modernised PSB licences to reflect PSBs’ use of on-demand players to deliver their public service remits, and removed outdated requirements from commercial radio, while ensuring that audiences continue to benefit from local news provision. This work continues in 2026 – last week we opened a consultation on our proposed new rules for PSB prominence on smart TVs. This will ensure that the BBC, ITV, Channels 4 & 5 and STV & S4C can continue to reach audiences and compete with global players in the modern media environment.

Promoting innovation and agile regulation within and beyond Ofcom’s remit

More generally, technology, including generative AI, is driving huge change across all Ofcom’s sectors. We are investing significantly in understanding, supporting and enabling responsible innovation. This includes doing hands-on and technical AI research, launching sandboxes and technical labs – especially in areas such as spectrum where our regulation involves licensing – and making large data sets available to help train and develop AI models. This involves collaboration with industry and other regulators so we can understand and support new AI use cases. Later this year, we will publish a further update on Ofcom’s strategic approach to AI, following our two previous updates in 2024 and 2025.

Regulators increasingly need to collaborate to respond to new developments in technology and markets. This is why we set up the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) in 2020 with the CMA, FCA and ICO. In 2025, the DRCF continued its work on regulatory innovation, building on the pilot of the Digital and AI Hub to ease innovators’ engagement with regulators. In March, the DRCF brought together 200 representatives from industry, civil society, academia, government, and regulators to focus on Responsible GenAI. In addition, the DRCF is creating a Digital Library to improve the accessibility of digital regulation and ease of compliance, funded by the Regulatory Innovation Office’s AI Innovation Fund.

Deregulation and streamlining

As well as seeking to promote growth in the rules we set, we also try to ensure that how we regulate doesn’t place unnecessary burdens on industry. We do this in two ways: identifying opportunities to deregulate where rules are no longer needed or are outdated; and actively streamlining our regulatory approach, so that businesses interacting with us face fewer costs and receive a more efficient service. This work contributes to the Government’s commitment to reduce the administrative burden of regulation by 25% over this parliament.

In 2025, we:

• Reduced the regulatory requirements imposed on Royal Mail, allowing the company to realise annual savings of between £250m and £425m;
• Abolished a regulator, absorbing the Phone-paid Services Authority’s functions into Ofcom in February We estimate that this will generate an estimated £6.7m of savings to industry over 5 years, or the equivalent of £1.34m each year;
• Deregulated the commercial radio sector, giving it more flexibility to adapt to changing audience needs, while protecting the provision of local news; and
• Decided not to carry out a market review or impose further regulation in the Application-to-Person messaging (A2P SMS) market, saving operators and Ofcom substantial administrative costs.

This year, we will continue to actively identify opportunities to deregulate and streamline. Last October, we launched a call for evidence to see where we can deregulate in broadcasting and ensure that unnecessary or outdated regulation is not holding back our TV and radio sectors. This will reduce compliance costs for broadcasters and create space for innovation within a modernised legislative and regulatory framework. We will also deliver further improvements to help streamline our spectrum regulations, which includes consulting on plans to streamline our licensing approach for Aeronautical Ground Stations.

We are working closely with DBT and DSIT on the Government’s commitments in this area. Internally, we are actively exploring how we can use AI to drive efficiency in our operations and streamline our processes.

Implementing the Online Safety Act and driving greater network security

In some areas, Government and Parliament have consciously chosen to increase regulatory responsibilities on certain industries, for good reasons. In our implementation of the Online Safety Act (OSA), the backdrop is twenty years during which social media, gaming, pornography and other companies have rolled out services to adults and children without sufficient, or any, regard to the safety of their users, particularly children. Our task is to drive a huge change in culture as well as a tangible improvement in safety standards, and to do so as quickly as we can. We are under no illusions about the magnitude or the urgency of this task, especially given the rapid acceleration of risk that is being driven by generative AI.

In 2025, large parts of the UK’s online safety regulation came into force for the first time. We published a full report in December 2025 setting out the changes we have already driven across the industry. These include widespread use of age checks at age 18 for the first time which have gone further than in any other jurisdiction, as well as new protections against grooming and child abuse imagery. On 12 January, we opened an enforcement investigation into X, to determine whether it has complied with its duties to protect people in the UK from content that is illegal in the UK. In 2026, you will see further concerted and urgent action from Ofcom to drive change. We work very closely with regulators in other jurisdictions to share best practice, including Australia and the EU.

The OSA inevitably places new regulatory costs on companies because we are asking them to carry out assessments and introduce new systems and processes that they have not previously had to prioritise. The largest and/or riskiest services rightly face the heaviest burdens. Nevertheless, we are committed to making online safety regulation as easy as possible to understand and comply with, particularly for small UK-based companies who want to get it right. In January 2025, we launched the beta version of our dedicated Digital Support Service (DSS), to help businesses understand their regulatory requirements under the OSA. We committed to completing the next phase of work on the DSS by summer 2025 – which we did in May. The DSS includes an online tool for businesses to check if the Act applies, and two interactive digital toolkits which provide a step-by-step guide to the risk assessment and safety duties for illegal content and protecting children. Since going live, our tools have been used thousands of times.

Similarly, our work on the security and resilience of telecoms and the digital infrastructure sector is key to ensuring that UK customers and businesses can rely on the networks that are crucial to their everyday lives. The Government’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill includes new duties for data centres and enhanced powers for Ofcom. While this will impose new regulatory burdens on businesses, proportionality is always baked into Ofcom’s decision making and will be a key consideration during our implementation of the new rules. Ultimately, secure networks support economic growth and productivity across the UK. They put guardrails in place, preventing costly, and in some cases catastrophic, interruptions to services which underpin the day to day running of our society and economy.

Looking ahead to 2026

Ofcom remains committed to making communications work for everyone, supporting growth and investment to ensure that we deliver for tomorrow’s citizens and consumers, as well as today’s. Our work is guided by our Board’s three-year plan that we published in March 2025, and by our annual Plans of Work, the latest version of which is currently out for public consultation. Taking into account stakeholder feedback, as well as the Government’s finalised Statements of Strategic Priorities, we will confirm our planned work for next year in March 2026.

We look forward to our continued engagement with Government on this vital area of work and would be happy to discuss any of the areas highlighted.

I am copying this letter to the Secretaries of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Liz Kendall; Business and Trade, Peter Kyle; and Culture, Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy.

Yours sincerely

MELANIE DAWES