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

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what proportion of premises (a) has access to and (b) is using superfast broadband; what the total number of premises is; and what proportion of that total has been provided with access to superfast broadband under the Government's rollout programme.

(a) Ofcom's Infrastructure Report 2014 http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/infrastructure/infrastructure-2014/ suggested that in June 2014 about 78% of UK premises had access to NGA services and about 75% had access to superfast services at 30Mbit/s or above. That figure is now likely to be above 80%.

(b) Ofcom's UK fixed-line broadband performance report http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/other/telecoms-research/broadband-speeds/broadband-speeds-november2014/ stated that 32% of UK residential broadband connections had a headline speed of ‘up to’ 30Mbit/s or higher in November 2014. Not all residential premises take any fixed broadband service.

DCMS is not responsible for statistics on the numbers of UK residential and non-residential premises, but for modelling purposes uses a total figure of about 29 million.

The DCMS Broadband Performance Indicators https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/broadband-performance-indicators stated that 2,411,395 premises had a superfast broadband service (above 24 Mbit/s download) made available by the end of March 2015 as a result of BDUK-supported projects. With further rollout since March, that figure will now exceed 2.5 million.