Project Gigabit Progress Update: June 2023

John Whittingdale Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2023 Written Statements

[The Minister for Data and Digital Infrastructure (Sir John Whittingdale)]

On 30 June 2023 we published, at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/project-gigabit-progress-update-june-2023 Building Digital UK’s (BDUK) latest progress update on Project Gigabit, the Government’s £5 billion mission to deliver lightning-fast, reliable broadband across the UK.

In this update, we report on the six latest contracts to be signed in Cambridgeshire, the New Forest, North Shropshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire with a total value of up to £425 million, covering up to 284,000 premises.

In total, we now have 30 live procurements and contracts in place, amounting to £1.4 billion of funding available to the market to extend gigabit-capable networks into hard-to-reach parts of the country.

We also provide an update on the development of our first cross-regional procurement, which has been designed as an alternative approach to reach premises in areas where there is insufficient market appetite to support a local or regional procurement.

The report also highlights our progress across the Union, with procurements planned to launch in the summer in Wales and in the autumn in Northern Ireland. The public review for Scotland has concluded, and the Scottish Government have committed to launch procurements by the end of the year.

On top of our Project Gigabit procurements, more than 117,000 vouchers have been issued so far under the gigabit broadband voucher scheme and its previous iterations. To date, 89,000 of these vouchers have been used to connect premises to a gigabit-capable connection. Two case studies included in the report provide an overview of the benefits of the voucher scheme, highlighting examples of successful projects on the Isle of Jura and in Elvington, North Yorkshire.

Finally, we report on the launch of an £8 million fund to provide satellite connectivity to a cohort of 35,000 of the very hardest-to-reach premises. This announcement follows the launch of alpha trials in December 2022.

I will place a copy of the latest Project Gigabit progress update in the Libraries of both Houses.

[HCWS903]