Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether her Department has taken steps to prevent BT from exclusively using Openreach fibre infrastructure following the legal separation in 2017.

Ofcom’s reforms of the BT Group’s governance structures in 2016 and 2017 were designed to address concerns that Openreach’s decisions were favouring BT and insufficiently considering the needs of other operators. Ofcom has since established the Openreach Monitoring Unit to monitor Openreach’s compliance with these reforms and publishes a report each year. The most recent report from December 2021 is available on Ofcom’s website here.

The government has not taken steps to mandate BT’s use of other networks, and as a commercial internet service provider, it is for BT to choose where to deploy its services and over which networks it chooses to offer these services.