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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential merits of launching a new scheme, similar to Project Lightning, to ensure that more homes can provide usable broadband.

The Department welcomes commercial investment in UK digital infrastructure such as Virgin Media’s Project Lightning and is working to encourage further investment through policies and funding. These include Business Rates Relief for fibre investment and the £200m Local Full Fibre Networks programme to fund locally-led projects that leverage commercial investment in full fibre broadband connections. For alternative network providers, £400 million of public funding has also been made available for fibre connectivity through the Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund, which will unlock approximately £1 billion of private investment.

Looking further ahead, the Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review is currently assessing what market models can best support broadband infrastructure investment in different areas of the UK.

The Government’s existing £1.7bn Broadband Delivery UK programme reached 95% of premises in December 2017 and is continuing with at least a further 2% likely to be achieved, ensuring that over 97% of premises in the UK can receive superfast broadband.