Openreach Take on UK Project Gigabit Broadband Contract for West Herefordshire

In a somewhat expected development, the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has confirmed that the previously stalled Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for West Herefordshire and the Forest of Dean (Lot 15), which was originally held by FullFibre Limited until they “mutually agreed to terminate” it in May 2025 (here), has been taken on by Openreach (BT).

Just to recap. The contract was originally valued at £23.4m (public subsidy) and aimed to extend gigabit-capable broadband connectivity to cover 7,900 premises in hard-to-reach areas, including locations such as Hay-on-Wye, Hereford, Kingstone, Ewyas Harold and Ross-on-Wye (here). But this was sent into limbo after the contracted supplier 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 covered by this contract“. Sadly, FullFibre Limited declined to comment, although smaller altnets are known to be under a lot of strain from high interest rates, rising build costs and competition etc.

Fast-forward to today and the good news is that BDUK have now agreed a contract change with Openreach to include these premises within their existing Call-Off 3 contract under the Single Supplier Framework agreement – now valued at c.£1.2bn, which is focused on Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements (no other suppliers currently tackle Type C). The deal closely mirrors what happened last week with the Peak District (Lot 3.01) contract (here), which was also previously held by FullFibre Limited.

Type C typically reflects remote areas where no or no appropriate market interest has 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. Openreach have already taken on deployments for other contracts that fell into similar difficulties with different altnets (examples here and here).

At the time of writing there’s currently no detail on whether there will be any changes to the original deployment plan or scope for Lot 15 as a result of this change. The BDUK statement simply says: “In April 2026 BDUK agreed a contract change with Openreach to include the West Herefordshire area within the existing Project Gigabit contract (call-off three) which covers other parts of Herefordshire.”