London Mayor Publishes Framework to Tackle Gigabit Broadband Notspots

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and London Councils have today published a new London Infrastructure Framework (LIF), which seeks to establish a shared long-term vision for London’s critical economic infrastructure priorities through to 2050. This includes, among other things, tackling the 390,000 premises across the city that are still “unserved” by gigabit broadband.

The full plan isn’t just about digital infrastructure and also seeks to unlock developments in housing, drive job creation and to upgrade the London transport network. “Increasing pressure on London’s essential systems – including our transport services, energy grid, water supply, waste services and digital connectivity networks, such as broadband and mobile – means greater investment is needed,” says the report.

The London Infrastructure Framework (LIF) is thus said to be setting out a pipeline of 51 priority projects across transport, energy, waste, water, flood risk and digital connectivity sectors. “These projects represent the most impactful schemes to unlock London’s growth and ensure resilience“, said the announcement, although our focus today will be solely on its plans for digital connectivity.

At this point some may note that the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme already aims to extend gigabit broadband to “nationwide” coverage (c.99% of UK premises) by 2032. But this is mostly focused upon helping rural areas, which tends to overlook that some urban areas can also end up being digitally disadvantaged due to various different reasons (examples).

The catch is that using public money to solve such issues in dense urban areas can sometimes breed legal competition challenges, since these are areas where the private sector should still be able to resolve themselves, even if the reality isn’t always quite so simple. Overall, the new document seems to spend most of its time producing a high-level summary of the challenges that still exist for broadband and mobile connectivity in London.

London’s Top 3 Digital Connectivity Challenges (LIF)

1. Access barriers and commercially unviable areas leave gaps in gigabit availability, with 390,000 premises across London unserved. Wayleaves are in place, and targeted public-sector programmes accelerate connectivity where the market alone cannot deliver.

2. London faces a widening mobile-performance gap, with poor indoor coverage and inadequate mobile capacity around transport hubs, commercial centres and high streets. Low approval rates for infrastructure, slow small-cell adoption and site loss from redevelopment reduce network reliability.

3. Data-centre growth is constrained by limited land and power, long connection queues, cooling and water-use uncertainty, and challenges coordinating delivery with wider energy and heat-network plans.

The problem is that the LIF doesn’t do a particularly good job of setting out how it’s going to resolve all of this. Instead, we get a vague list of projects, which seem to include a lot of pre-existing developments and some that haven’t recently been making much progress. For example, it mentions CommunityFibre’s roll-out of FTTP broadband in the city, but this has long since switched its focus from new network build to commercialisation.

In addition, there’s also a mention of the proposed Project Gigabit procurement for Greater London (Lot 37), which was first promoted a few years ago and since then there have been no new updates. Suffice to say that it’s quite tricky to pull anything particularly new out of the LIF, which seems to largely just be about rehashing existing ideas/projects to promote them as something new.

Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said:

“It’s crucial that we increase levels of investment to ensure our city has the right infrastructure to meet the current and future needs of Londoners and businesses.”

This framework, developed in conjunction with London Councils, builds on the progress already made and provides a springboard for the next phase of our long-term investment plans. I’m calling on partners – public and private – to join us in delivering the infrastructure our city needs to secure London’s resilience, competitiveness and growth for decades to come.

Londoners are at the heart of this plan, ensuring that everyone benefits from the opportunities that modern, well-planned infrastructure creates, as we continue building a better and more prosperous London for everyone.”

However, the LIF does finish by proposing a few fairly common-sense actions, some of which touch on important areas like planning. But it’s unclear how much of this will specifically benefit the digital connectivity side of things.

LIF’s Proposed Actions

To realise the opportunities set out in the LIF, London government should:

1. Build the case for government backing: Demonstrate a powerful case for investment in our continued growth and work together with key partners to promote the LIF Portfolio and London’s priorities to Government.

2. Create an infrastructure delivery champion to secure public and private investment: Develop the business case that identifies a clear rationale, scope and outcomes of a delivery champion that provides the capital, leadership, expertise and ability to progress investable projects.

3. Regularly update the London Infrastructure Framework: Leverage the LIF’s established robust prioritisation framework to periodically update the LIF Portfolio.

4. Seek greater fiscal autonomy to deliver long-term infrastructure: Make the case to national government for fiscal devolution and to secure stable, long-term infrastructure funding to support relevant LIF schemes.

5. Strengthen system-wide resilience: Convene key resilience partners to develop a new approach that embeds resilience considerations across infrastructure planning to better prioritise future investment.

6. Adopt place-based infrastructure portfolios: Work with local authorities and Sub-Regional Partnerships to move beyond sector-specific pipelines toward joined-up, coordinated planning across infrastructure types.

7. Cultivate the skills and supply chains to deliver infrastructure: Strengthen engagement with the supply chain and workforce needed to deliver the long-term pipeline identified in the LIF, aligning with London’s Inclusive Talent Strategy.

8. Accelerate innovation and smarter use of data: Work with partners to pilot new technologies and innovative uses of data that save money, improve resilience, and demonstrate scalability of emerging technologies.

9. Align regulation with London’s needs: Enable cross-sector regulatory reform that addresses challenges and priorities, such as the need to invest ahead of demand and identifying inefficiencies and interdependencies.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that BusinessLDN has today also launched a new action plan to boost growth in London (here), which among other things pledges to support growth of digital and technologies by: 1) Improving mapping of city level data on fibre coverage in London, to identify gaps and to enable network companies to plan more efficiently; and, 2) Ensuring the London Plan – the Mayor’s spatial strategy – reflects the modern-day needs of digital infrastructure so that borough planning decisions actively protect and support mobile and fixed connectivity. Once again, it’s all a bit vague.