Govt expand two of Openreach’s UK Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contracts

The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) unit has today posted contract modifications for two of Openreach’s Project Gigabit contracts – Call Off 3 (East and South Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and Southwest Wales) and Call Off 8 (Cheshire). The move expands their public investment and planned deployment of full fibre broadband ISP networks into rural areas.

Just to recap. The Call-off 3 contract was originally signed on 19th December 2024, which was previously valued at £150.6m (public subsidy) and committed Openreach to cover a further 65,120 premises in hard-to-reach rural areas with their new FTTP infrastructure. By comparison Call-off 8 was signed on 26th February 2026, which was valued at £37.5m and aimed to reach 18,460 premises.

According to the latest BDUK status update from September 2026 (here), Openreach has so far built to 4,480 of the contracted premises under call-off 3 (7% completed) and 990 premises under the much more recent call-off 8 (5% completed). However, such contracts are not static and their scope, as well as committed levels of public funding, can change over time for a number of different reasons.

For example, commercial operators may expand or reduce their roll-out plans in the same region(s), which can reduce or grow the scope for public investment within those same areas. The contracted operator could also find the deployment to be more expensive, or possibly even cheaper, than previously envisaged.

In addition, Openreach is the only operator to hold a Single Supplier Framework agreement for Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements. Type C typically reflects remote rural areas where no or no appropriate market interest has previously been expressed before to BDUK by other suppliers, or areas that have been de-scoped or terminated from a prior procurement / contract (examples here, here, here and here).

In this case it looks like Openreach’s call-off 3 and call-off 8 contracts are due to benefit from a significant expansion in their scope.

Contract changes

Call-off 3 (East and South Shropshire, North Herefordshire, North Wales, and Southwest Wales)

Following the modification, the awarded contract value has increased by £7,970,150 to £158,561,356 from the previous value of £150,591,207. The awarded premises have increased by 3,616 to a total of 68,856 from the previous 65,240.

Call-off 8 (Cheshire)

Following the modification, the awarded contract value has increased by £13,572,152. The awarded premises have increased by 11,360 – total value excluding VAT is now £51,086,798.

The development comes shortly after the Government quietly revealed that they had increased the potential value of Openreach’s Single Supplier Framework from around £1.5bn to £2.346bn. At the time we speculated that this would enable the network operator to absorb some of the premises that had been left stuck in limbo by several recently failed or scaled-back Project Gigabit contracts with different suppliers (e.g. several of CityFibre contracts have recently been reduced and one was abandoned – here and here), much as they’ve done before.

If the above holds true then there will probably be an official announcement in the not too distance future. However, such adjustments may also occur due to general changes in build costs and interest rates / inflation, as well as any unexpected obstacles to street works or greater efficiencies of build than planned or expected. Suffice to say, there can be various reasons why the contracted scope of related builds and the level of allocated public funding may change over time.

The catch is that there may be further changes in the future, which could go in a different direction. So, it’s not always easy to tell what the final picture will be until you actually reach the end of each contracted build.