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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps her Department is taking in response to the application by Openreach in January 2021 on behalf of 42 households in St Leonards, Dorset to have DCMS vouchers under the Community Fibre Partnership Scheme; and if she will make a statement.

The Community Fibre Partnership scheme (now titled the Fibre Community Partnership scheme) is an Openreach scheme for local community broadband projects. In rural areas, Openreach encourages communities to use the voucher funding provided by the government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) to pay towards the cost of installing the network.

As there are a number of ongoing voucher applications in St Leonards, officials in Building Digital UK (BDUK) have been unable to identify the particular project that has been raised in this question. As Fibre Community Partnership’s are Openreach products, Openreach should be able to provide information on the status of this particular project.