Posted: 23rd Nov, 2011 By: MarkJ


An outcry by opposition politicians has forced the
Liberal Democrat run
Bath & North East Somerset Council (BNESC) to review last week's
rejection of £670,000 in BDUK funding (
here), which was intended to help improve the local broadband ISP infrastructure with
Next Generation Access (NGA) services. Instead the council pledged to spend just £25,000 upon exploring alternatives.
The money would have been taken from the government's Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office budget of
£530m. It could have helped 90% of local people and businesses gain access to a superfast broadband (
24Mbps+) service by 2015. However, BNESC feared that it could also
incur costs of around £1 million, which made the process seem too expensive.
The move did not go down well with thirteen
Conservative and one
Labour member of the council, which promptly triggered an
official review of the decision. According to
This is Bath, a cross-party panel of backbench councillors will now examine the issue within the next two weeks.
Council Martin Veal, the Conservative Shadow Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods, said:
"By deciding not to join with our neighbouring councils in their bid for Government funding to improve local broadband, the Liberal Democrats are sacrificing an important opportunity for our area and could leave Bath and North East Somerset trailing behind the rest of the west country. Are we really content to be confined to the slow-lane of the information superhighway?"
Veal confirmed that the council would "
have to put in its own funding alongside the Government investment" but stated that the benefits would "
clearly outweigh the costs". A successful review could force the council into reconsidering the matter with a view to engagement with BDUK.