Two councils pull out of rural broadband schemes
Two councils pull out of rural broadband schemes
Two initiatives to roll out fibre broadband to isolated areas have lost crucial funding from their local authorities.
Government agency Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) said it was surprised that Dorset County Council has pulled its funding for the Trailways scheme in the north of the county and Oxfordshire has done the same with the Cotswold Broadband project.
Under Government rules, schemes must receive funds at local level to be eligible for a share of the £530 million in public money available towards improving rural broadband networks. BDUK issues the grants under the scheme that is aiming to bring superfast broadband connections to nine out of ten British homes.
Grants for smaller projects to bring broadband to the ten per cent of more isolated areas set to miss out on the first scheme can also be made from a £230 million pot of public cash. It was to this fund that Cotswolds Broadband and Trailways applied last year but in order to receive money, they needed support from their local councils. Both local authorities have now said no because they are worried about issues such as the rising costs of the broadband schemes and the possibility they may fail.
A spokesperson from Oxfordshire County Council told PC Pro: "This at a time when the council is seeking to find vast budget savings.”
However, BDUK, which had been speaking to both the local authorities and the projects themselves, was left surprised by the councils’ decisions to pull out.
BDUK consultant Adrian Wooster said: "Certainly BDUK made a fairly significant offer to the county councils to mitigate any risks - the councils obviously feel it wasn't sufficient, but there was nothing we could have done.”
He said that BDUK was “throwing every resource we can reasonably” to prevent other smaller rural schemes from going down the same route.
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