Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to ensure that the 500,000 properties currently unable to access a broadband service running at a minimum of 10Mbps via a fixed line will be able to access broadband.

The Government has set out its plan to deliver Project Gigabit, our £5 billion mission to deliver fast, reliable broadband across the UK, and we are making good progress. Our target is for 85% of UK premises to have access to gigabit-capable broadband by 2025, and over 99% by 2030. This will include some premises currently unable to access more than 10Mbps.

More than £1 billion of public subsidy has been made available to broadband suppliers to extend their gigabit-capable networks to rural and hard to reach parts of the country. To date, we have awarded six contracts in locations from Cornwall to Cumbria, and we have launched a further 15 procurements, which combined will deliver fast, reliable broadband to up to 748,000 premises that would have otherwise missed out.

Furthermore, while approximately 500,000 premises do not currently have access to a decent broadband connection of 10mbps download and 1mbps upload, of these approximately 420,000 have access to a Fixed Wireless Access connection offering at least this level of connectivity. A further 15,000 of the remaining 80,000 premises are due to receive an upgrade within the next 12 months from a government funded rollout.

For the remaining 65,000 premises, the broadband Universal Service Obligation, which came into effect on 20 March 2020, provides consumers with a right to request a decent broadband service, where they cannot access a service of at least 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload via either a fixed line or fixed wireless access connection. As of September 2022, BT has built USO connections to over 5,900 premises, with more than 2,000 further builds in progress.

For the small number of premises that will not receive a gigabit-capable connection and are considered Very Hard to Reach, the government is assessing alternative ways to improve their broadband connection and help address the challenges that these areas face in their broadband connectivity.

In December 2022 we announced the first four locations in our Alpha Trial programme to test the technical capability of, and user response to, new low-latency Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites in some of the hardest to reach locations in the UK and we are working to finalise further locations soon.