Scotland set to close Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme in Nov 2026

The Scottish Government (SG) has announced that, following a “review of market conditions“, they will close their own Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme (SBVS) to new applications on 20th November 2026. The move comes shortly after the UK Government closed their own voucher scheme (GBVS) to new projects last month.

Just to recap. The SBVS previously offered vouchers worth up to £5,000 per property to help homes and businesses in poorly served areas pay for the installation of a faster broadband connection. In order to be eligible for this, homes needed to be in an area that could currently only deliver speeds of less than 30Mbps and where there were no plans for future upgrades (either through government programmes or commercial builds).

However, broadband coverage has improved significantly since the original scheme launched, while vouchers have also increasingly found themselves coming into some conflict with other subsidised deployments. For example, the Scottish Government is currently expanding the coverage of full fibre (FTTP) networks into remote areas via Openreach (BT) under the £697m Reaching 100% (R100) project – aiming to cover a total of 112,939 premises in poorly served areas by March 2028 (100,217 premises have already been done).

In addition, both Openreach and GoFibre have more recently also secured several additional publicly subsidised gigabit broadband roll-out contracts for Scotland under the UK’s wider £5bn Project Gigabit scheme (here, here and here). Over the next few years this will extend FTTP to an additional 139,000 premises in remote rural areas of Scotland via an additional public subsidy of around £288m (i.e. focusing on the bits that R100 fails to reach).

Finally, alternative solutions, such as those delivered via 4G/5G mobile broadband networks, fixed wireless connections and Starlink’s LEO satellites, have also increased in coverage and performance. In the case of Starlink, they’ve also become much more affordable. All of this has had an impact on the viability of the SBVS.

A spokesperson for the Scottish Government said:

“Following a review of market conditions, SBVS will close to new applications from 20 November 2026. Until that date we will continue to only accept fully costed projects which have confirmed beneficiary sign up.

The supplier will have up to 12 months to fulfil the voucher request. SBVS was introduced to support homes and businesses that could not access affordable superfast broadband through commercial provision or publicly subsidised delivery programmes. Since its launch in 2020, the scheme has helped provide more than 6,000 connections to homes and businesses across Scotland – playing an important role in improving digital connectivity.

Broadband availability has improved significantly since the scheme was introduced. There has been substantial growth in commercial broadband availability, including full fibre, fixed wireless, mobile and satellite services. Affordable superfast broadband is now available across Scotland.”

Despite the wider improvements, Project Gigabit is not currently expected to reach truly universal coverage and there will always be gaps in mobile broadband’s reach, as well as its performance. Suffice to say that there will be plenty of people in such areas who now feel as if the UK and Scottish governments are giving up on bringing fixed line solutions to remote areas in favour of a greater dependence upon Starlink and similar solutions.

The SBVS page also now carries a similar notice to the one above, albeit slimmed down.