BDUK - Local Authority Voucher top up query

[Peter S]

I am In the process of trying to coordinate an Openreach CFP and was chatting to my point of contact at Openreach earlier today. He advised me that even if the Local Authority’s published gigabit voucher top up is, for example £1,500 for a residential premise and £3,500 for a business, it is BDUK not the L.A which decides what top up can be offered to each CFP on a case by case basis.

I was wondering whether anyone else had heard of this and whether it had impacted anyone’s community schemes ?

 

[Mark.J]

BDUK are the arbiters of the gigabit voucher scheme and oversee / approve all the allocations / decide on final eligibility, which is how it has always been. But in practice, if extra funding exists for an eligible property, and it's necessary to draw down on that for a deployment to proceed, then they will usually use it. This is all about ensuring that no more public funding is used than strictly necessary to achieve the outcome, for obvious reasons.

 

[Peter S]

BDUK are the arbiters of the gigabit voucher scheme and oversee / approve all the allocations / decide on final eligibility, which is how it has always been. But in practice, if extra funding exists for an eligible property, and it's necessary to draw down on that for a deployment to proceed, then they will usually use it. This is all about ensuring that no more public funding is used than strictly necessary to achieve the outcome, for obvious reasons.

Hi Mark,
I appreciate that BDUK want to ensure maximum value for their investment and to clawback revenue wherever possible. However, I was wondering whether they actually take the time to drill down and look at the social demographic of each community.

For example my small local community consists of around 40 premises, half of which are middle income, owner occupied residences and the other 20 premises are a mixture of low income families on short term tenancy agreements, and rented strorage units.

It is very easy to sign up the premises which are owner occupied, but incredibly difficult to sign up any of tenants who may well ultimately use the broadband service when available, but don’t wish to be committed to the stringent qualifying terms of the vouchers.

This voucher funding model probably works very well in affluent owner occupied villages of the South East, but I hope that BDUK appreciate that not all rural towns and villages are like this, and adjust the top up funding accordingly to ensure communities like ours can benefit from the scheme too.