Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced a major new £300m "broadband for all" initiative aimed at getting low-income families hooked up to the Internet. The scheme will be formally revealed as part of Brown's annual Labour party conference speech today.

The governments department for children will provide the funding, which is to be distributed out in sums of between £100 and £700 per family and should ultimately reach up to 1m households or 1.4m children. The scheme itself will initially be trialled before being rolled out in a phased manner around England by 2011.

However it's worth pointing out that a similar scheme was announced by Labour during 1997 and again more recently by Children's Secretary Ed Balls, suggesting that it may not be that new after all. Meanwhile the union for education professionals, Voice, has pointed out another obvious pitfall:


More details are expected to be released in due course.