Broadband: Voucher Schemes

(asked on 15th October 2021) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, how her Department defines a rural area when determining the eligibility of premises for the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme.


Answered by
Julia Lopez Portrait
Julia Lopez
Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
This question was answered on 22nd October 2021

Project Gigabit, and therefore the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, is designed to be responsive to the market so that we focus taxpayers' money on places that are too expensive to build on a commercial basis.

The voucher scheme is designed to target government subsidy towards those living and working in the hard to reach, commercially unavailable areas of the country and we are reliant upon independent sources of reference. In terms of the rural classification, this is defined using agreed standard measures according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) or equivalent.

For premises in England and Wales, rural is defined as those premises with the classifications D1-F2 inclusive as defined within the Office for National Statistics publication "The 2011 Rural-Urban Classification For Small Area Geographies”.

Ruralility for premises in Northern Ireland are based on classifications E-H inclusive as defined by the “Review of the Statistical Classification and Delineation of Settlements”, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA).

For premises in Scotland, rurality is determined by classifications 3-8 inclusive, as defined within Scottish Government Urban Rural Classification 2013-2014.

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