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

To ask the Secretary of State of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what plans his Department has to support the delivery of a full-fibre roll-out in towns and cities throughout the UK.

The Government has ambitious targets for world class digital infrastructure with 15 million premises connected to full fibre by 2025, and national coverage by 2033. The Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review, published in July 2018, set out the overall strategy for how to achieve these targets.

The Review concluded the most effective way to deliver these ambitions is to promote competition between fibre networks where possible intervene where necessary. The Review’s analysis suggests that commercial investment will be viable for up to 90% of premises in the UK. To ensure deployment is as cheap and easy as possible, the Barrier Busting Task Force has been established to remove issues like wayleaves, planning and streetworks.

The Local Full Fibre Networks programme, launched in November 2017, will have invested almost £300 million to stimulate commercial full fibre investment across the UK by the end of the programme in 2021, while

Government is also supporting competitive commercial investment through the £400 million Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund, which is expected to unlock over £1 billion investment in full fibre.

Industry have continued to respond with commitments to full fibre rollout with CityFibre, Hyperoptic and Openreach all making significant announcements to deploy full fibre in a number of towns and cities across the UK as well as new entrants also entering the market. We are now seeing full fibre coverage increase at pace with 7% of premises in the UK now able to connect to full fibre, up from 4% around 12 months ago.