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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of including prospective premises in the Open Market Review that takes place prior to the procurement exercise for a new fibre roll-out.

When an Open Market Review (OMR) data set is pulled together all serviceable premises which are eligible for funding are included. This uses a unique premises reference number, which is how the individual sites in a procurement are defined. This is allocated at planning permission stage so they could theoretically be included, however there would only be a benefit in doing so if the build timescales aligned to the proposed intervention of that particular project

In the recent Queen’s Speech, there was reference to our intention to bring forward secondary legislation in relation to new build. If successful this would compel developers to work with network providers to make gigabit capable infrastructure available from day one. This would make the inclusion of these premises in an OMR process academic.