Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if he will publish a list of (a) the projects funded and (b) the amount of funding each project has received through Project Gigabit.

Project Gigabit was launched in March 2021 and its spend for the financial year 2021-22 will be reported through DCMS’s Annual Report and Accounts, which will be published in due course.

In April 2022, Building Digital UK (BDUK) became an Executive Agency of DCMS, and will publish its own Annual Report and Accounts, including details of Project Gigabit spend, from next year.

BDUK also publishes quarterly updates on the Project Gigabit Delivery plan and procurement pipeline for the £5 billion gigabit broadband roll out, with the most recent Summer Update published in August 2022.

We have already launched procurements with a value of over £700 million to deliver gigabit connections to hard-to-reach homes and businesses across the UK, and we recently signed our first contracts in North Dorset and Teesdale in Durham.

In addition to our Project Gigabit procurements, through the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme and its previous iterations, we have issued over 100,000 vouchers worth more than £214 million. Over 73,000 of these vouchers have been used to connect premises to gigabit-capable broadband.

In July 2022 we announced a joint £82 million investment with the Department for Education (DfE) to connect up to 3,000 primary schools with gigabit broadband over the next three years.