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The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, which oversees their £5bn Project Gigabit broadband roll-out and the Shared Rural Network (SRN) programme for upgrading 4G coverage in remote areas, has today published their combined annual progress report and accounts for the period 1st April 2024 to 31st March 2025. This also includes some data on the level of fraud in their programmes.
In terms of their progress on delivery of Project Gigabit, the new report doesn’t really add much to last month’s annual progress update, as it covers the same period of time (here). But it does also contain a lot more information about BDUK’s accounts and management (if that’s of any interest), although you’ll need to pick out your magnifying glass to scan across all 104 pages of it to find any interesting bits.
For example, the report acknowledges that “there is a risk that BDUK will not achieve its target of 99% gigabit-capable connectivity by 2032 due to supplier challenges, funding constraints, market conditions or deployment complexities” (this target was only recently delayed from 2030 to 2032).
A similar statement is also made about the SRN’s January 2027 completion target, with BDUK noting the “complex delivery challenges associated with very rural areas” and the fact that they do not have “direct contracting relationships with power and transmission suppliers and therefore relies on grant recipients to deliver outputs to necessary timescales.”
Something else we noted was the data on fraud and error controls within BDUK, which exist in most public programmes to help prevent abuse (e.g. abuse of public funding, such as in the gigabit voucher scheme), although a lot of the context is missing to help explain where this arises. The fact they stick fraud and errors together for a lot of combined figures is also a little annoying, but they do separate it out in other areas.
BDUK Figures on Fraud and Error
Our fraud and error audit has found (based on cumulative results since 2022 to 2023 to ensure the robustness of the sample) 0.9% of the sampled transactions were categorised as irregular with 0.7% being classified as Supplier Error and 0.1% being classified as Official Error. 0.1% were classified as Suspected Fraud. For the cases specifically identified as part of our audit work the main causes of error identified included:
Beneficiary eligibility;
Retrospective requests for vouchers, where the connection was delivered prior to the request for a voucher.
Based on this estimation the overall level of underlying fraud and error in the vouchers scheme for 2024 to 2025 is therefore estimated to be £650,700 (based on spend of £72,300,000), £72,300 of which would be suspected fraud. This aligns with the total detected and recovered fraud and error figures submitted through the 2024/25 Consolidated Data Return.
If we were to apply the above estimation to the £180,500,000 of spend on our Gigabit contracts there would be c.£1,624,500 of fraud and error, £180,500 of which would be suspected fraud. In future years we will focus more attention on fraud and error in our Gigabit contracts as they increase in spend and delivery. However, our detailed fraud risk assessments show this mechanism as being relatively low risk given the extensive contract management controls, processes and procedures in place.
The full report covers many more areas and so, if you’re interested in the inner workings of BDUK, then this is for you. On the other hand, if you’d much rather have a cup of tea and a biscuit, then you’ll probably save your sanity by not having to read through 104 pages of mostly political / economic waffle and statistics.
Finally, we should remind readers that the government are currently in the process of ending BDUK’s status as an executive agency and instead integrating it back into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) from 1st November 2025 (here).