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The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has tweaked the eligibility criteria for their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) again, which among other things now requires that a home or business must have existing available broadband download speeds of less than 1Gbps in order to be eligible (previously it was 100Mbps).
Just to recap. The GBVS typically offers grants worth up to £4,500 to help remote rural or poorly served urban homes and businesses get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed, which as above, is now also available to areas with speeds of “less than 1Gbps” – assuming there are no near-term plans for a gigabit deployment in the same area (either via private or state-aid funding).
The GBVS is currently only open to a limited number of areas across the United Kingdom (i.e. Derbyshire, Birmingham and the Black Country, Merseyside and Greater Manchester, Greater London, Scotland and the Isle of Wight.) and, until recently, it was also focused almost exclusively on catering for the hardest to reach rural areas. But in March 2025 this scheme was also opened up to help tackle some poorly served urban areas too (here).
The latest changes to voucher eligibility, which somewhat slipped under our radar when they were quietly introduced a week ago, include the removal of the rurality clause in order to enable premises under the urban extension of the scheme to be included in projects, as well as urban premises identified through BDUK’s related market engagement process.
As above, the threshold for the existing speed at a premises (home or business) has also increased from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, although the requirement for a “step change” in service speed remains in place (reflecting at least a doubling of speeds).
The rules also now state that premises deemed to be under construction or built within the last two years are ineligible for vouchers, which is perhaps because the law now requires that developers of most new build homes should already be ensuring that such properties are built to a gigabit-capable standard. But there are some exceptions to that law, so there may be cases where this tweak is unhelpful (e.g. smaller individual house builds in very remote areas).
Finally, the classification rules are now aligned to the rest of Project Gigabit and there are two additional ways for BDUK to assess whether a home or business is likely to receive gigabit capable broadband without public subsidy (i.e. local intelligence gathered by BDUK, and all premises at the same location are now ineligible for the GBVS if one premises at that location can already access gigabit broadband).
However, it’s unlikely that any of this will have a huge impact on the scheme’s progress, not least because the limited (highly variable) level of availability doesn’t exactly help, and it’s now much less user-friendly / accessible than it once was (BDUK previously scrapped their availability checker and now require people to first manually identify a local supplier from deep within the scheme’s info. pages).
The eligibility criteria changes apply to new projects submitted from 5th June 2025 onwards and will not impact existing approved projects.