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The Kent County Council (KCC) in England has complained to the UK government about a “lack of progress” being made on the region’s Project Gigabit broadband rollout contract for rural communities. The £112m (state aid) contract for this was awarded to CityFibre in early 2024 (here), which committed to extend full fibre to 50,000+ hard-to-reach premises.
However, the last progress update we saw on the contract for Kent (Lot 29) came in January 2025, when CityFibre announced that they’d entered the rollout (build) phase. But since then neither CityFibre nor the government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has issued any further progress updates of real substance and it didn’t figure into BDUK’s recent progress update either (here), albeit mainly because the data for that only ran to the end of 2024.
Paul King, KCC’s Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Coastal Regeneration, has now written to Sir Chris Bryant MP, UK Minister for Data Protection and Telecoms, asking “why there has been so little progress” in delivering the Government’s Project Gigabit programme across Kent, despite the procurement work starting more than three years ago.
“To date, BDUK have still not published any indications as to when local areas are likely to benefit from these connections – or details on whether any premises have been connected to date,” said the statement from KCC. Cllr King also raised the lack of information available to home and business owners about when they might receive the new broadband capability as a concern. He explained this made it difficult for them to make decisions about tying in with providers who will not be able to offer services on the new infrastructure.
The councillor added that there are at least 100,000 properties in the county who could have the fast speeds who do not feature in the current programme and there is currently “no suggestion if or when they might in any future plans for expansion of the project“.
Councillor Paul King said:
“Good broadband connectivity is essential to enable any business to thrive and for residents to access the services and opportunities they need. We understand the complexities and challenges involved in building broadband infrastructure in hard-to-reach areas but it is difficult to understand why it is taking so long for these much-needed connections to be delivered at the pace required.
This is simply not acceptable. Our region continues to lag substantially behind with respect to broadband connectivity while the UK’s Industrial Strategy 2025 is contingent on unlocking the value of data and accelerating AI adoption across businesses. If this Government is serious about economic growth then digital infrastructure must come first – without reliable internet access, AI is nothing more than a buzzword.”
The issue that KCC raises is in fact not unique to Kent. The Project Gigabit programme as a whole, which is much more centrally managed than earlier schemes (e.g. Superfast Broadband Programme / SFBB), has been generally quite poor at keeping people in contracted areas up-to-date with progress once the build has begun.
So while earlier schemes, run and managed at the local authority level, often produced regular progress updates, reports and interactive coverage maps etc. The Project Gigabit programme has communicated very little of the same and only recently started releasing general data on the number of contracted premises that had been built.
ISPreview has raised this with BDUK a few times before and we are expecting Kent to be included in the programme’s next progress update, which is due to drop before the end of this year (this should also include some additional details). But there’s clearly room for improvement, although the government would perhaps need to put more resources on the table to make that happen.
In the meantime, Cllr King has asked for the restoration of the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) in Kent, “so communities can request a better broadband connection in their area“. The GBVS is currently suspended across much of the country (not all), including Kent, albeit partly to avoid it clashing with and risking a duplication of public investment with Project Gigabit’s primary build contracts.
We have also asked CityFibre for a comment and hopefully a progress update on the deployment in Kent.