Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, with reference to Government grants statistics 2020 to 2021, published on 31 March 2022, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the 5G Testbeds and Trials 2021.

The 5G Testbeds and Trials ran between 2017 and 2023, and involved supporting 37 projects to maximise the prospective benefits of 5G to the UK economy through timely deployment and effective utilisation of 5G technology.

Several assessments have been made on the effectiveness of spending in this program, most recently the interim evaluation into the programme, published on 11th of August.

The independent evaluation assesses the processes, delivery and impact of the program and found that funding competition processes and project support were effective and allowed a diverse portfolio of projects to be supported. Projects realised benefits to the wider community and carried out new 5G activities. Improvements could have been made on payment systems and underspends.

These impacts are for the program, not year by year. Projects ran for multiple years, so a single year would be uninformative of the scale of impact.

The department has multiple safeguards in place to ensure value for money and avoid fraud. This begins at the competition stage, where we assess bids for value for money and feasibility of being able to deliver against the proposed budget. At the project set-up phase we conduct financial due diligence on partners within the consortium to ensure the contracted entities are financially stable. We continue to check grant claims through the lifetime of projects, verifying expenditure and carrying out fraud checks.