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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 12 February 2015 to Question 223687, whether the (a) County Durham, (b) Oxfordshire, (c) Hampshire, (d) Essex, (e) Wokingham, (f) Black Country and (g) South Yorkshire project teams are permitted to share information on BT's costs.

Each Local Authority project team has 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 through the open book accounting process that it has in place 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.