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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, whether the Black Country and South Yorkshire Project Areas have been signed to non-disclosure agreements regarding BT's costs on Phase II of the rural broadband project.

The Black Country and South Yorkshire project teams have complete visibility of all BT’s costs and how these relate to the deployment of each element of the project. BDUK has the same data for all the broadband projects delivered under the framework contract with BT, and BDUK provides detailed cost comparison reports to each local project team allowing them to compare their costs with those of the other projects across the rest of the country. This allows any costs which look out of the ordinary to be identified and investigated further with BT. BT is only paid for incremental eligible capital expenditure required for delivery of the programme. As set out in the National Audit Office’s memorandum of 28 January 2015, a recent independent review of BT’s costs for delivery of a sample of cabinets which was carried out for BDUK has found these to be around 20 per cent lower than those of a typical efficient operator.