The Local Government Association (LGA) has said local authorities should be given more funding and power to help improve connectivity in their areas – with a key role for local digital champions.
It has published a statement on the issue following the publication of a report by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee criticising the progress of the Government’s Project Gigabit programme to improve broadband availability nationwide.
The LGA reacted to the report by highlighting councils’ role in improving local connectivity, and how reliable broadband connections have been crucial in supporting communities during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Its digital connectivity spokesperson Cllr Mark Hawthorne said: “To help the Government reach its 2025 target, councils need more funding to support telecommunication providers to deliver improvements on the ground. The Government should empower councils to place a local digital champion in every local area to help facilitate delivery and support providers to install gigabit capable broadband as quickly as possible.
“This will be essential to avoiding local bottlenecks and the slowing down of delivery. We are concerned there is no detailed plan in place to ensure those in the very hardest to reach areas are not left behind.
"A local digital champion would be a central contact point for government and broadband providers to help problem solve deployment issues in the local area.
“Tackling the digital divide will be important to levelling up in every community, ensuring everyone has the connectivity and digital skills they need to thrive.”
Slow roll out
The PAC said is not convinced the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) will meet even its downgraded targets for the roll out of superfast broadband. In 2020 DCMS accepted that its original target of nationwide gigabit broadband by 2025 was unachievable and revised the target to 85% coverage by 2025.
Its report says a new goal of almost full coverage by 2030 does not cover around 134,000 premises in the hardest to reach areas and there is no detailed plan for reaching communities where it is not commercially viable to do so.
This reflects an over-reliance on commercial providers and threatens to perpetuate the digital divide in the UK, the PAC says.
Committee chair Dame Meg Hillier MP said: “DCMS’ planning and project management show all the signs of the previous roll out – that the focus will continue to be on the easier to reach areas and there is still no clear plan for the hardest to reach communities.
“It couldn’t really explain how broadband has got as far as it has in this critical national strategy, beyond ‘thanks to Virgin Media’, and incredibly it still doesn’t have a real plan for getting the rest of the way to its own downgraded targets.
“What DCMS does know full well is it can’t rely on the private sector to get fast broadband to the hardest to reach, excluded and rural areas, and despite its repeated promises to do exactly that we are apparently little nearer to closing ‘the great digital divide’ developing across the UK nor addressing the social and economic inequality it brings with it.”
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