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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, for what reason his Department has recently changed the value of vouchers on the Community Fibre Partnership from the value that was originally agreed.

Community Fibre Partnerships are an Openreach product that they use on our Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS). Openreach operates the Community Fibre Partnership (CFP) Scheme all over the UK and they use this as an aggregation platform to gather initial contact details and ‘pledges’ (Openreach term) for communities who want to improve their broadband. The particular costings of a CFP scheme are determined by Openreach, but since the launch of the GBVS, Openreach has encouraged communities to use the voucher funding provided by the government to pay for the cost of installing the network to rural communities.

We are investing up to £210 million in vouchers over the next three years. The new voucher’s value matches that of our previous scheme, £1,500 for homes and £3,500 for businesses,which has already successfully transformed connectivity for communities across the country with 72,000 vouchers issued worth £137 million.

If you are referring to a particular project in your constituency my officials would be happy to investigate this for you, but in order to do so they would need a Pre-Registered Package (PRP) number associated with the voucher project.