How much public money has been spent on broadband?

Over the last few years, money from the public purse has been spent on both broadband infrastructure and also broadband marketing, grants to SMEs, and encouraging take-up. Additionally, the ISPs have spent phenomenal amounts on advertising their products and services. (One could say at the expense of developing and deploying the products and services the consumer and economy wants and needs.) Yet the broadband job is still not done.

The majority of the public money has been given to the RDAs (Regional Development Agencies) to spend in each region. ABC decided to look into how much money had been spent, how it had been spent,  how much is still being spent, etc. Additionally, because the broadband job has not been done - there are still far too many notspots and it seems that possibly at least 50% of the UK will not get 8Mbps, let alone 24Mbps*, leaving us well down the international league table for high speed connections - we thought we'd look to see what evaluations had been done of how the money had been spent, and how the lessons learned are being applied to solve the ongoing problems.

(*Source: Point Topic:  Local loop lengths in the UK, Oct 2005)

However, this looks as though it is going to be an ongoing saga as after many months seeking answers, we don't appear to be much closer as we keep making obvious, but apparently entirely wrong, assumptions.

Assumption 1: That there would be accurate and publicly available records kept  of the monies spent by each region on broadband. In a business world these would be called 'departmental accounts' for a specific expenditure head.

Assumption 2: That these accounts would be scrutinised to show return on investment, wastage, value for money, achieving objectives etc. As with any business investment.

Assumption 3: As the DTI was the body dishing out the money, these accounts would be held by the DTI.

Assumption 4: Each RDA would know how it had spent the public money it was given to spend on broadband.

Assumption 5: Because this is public money, there would be some assessment and evaluation of whether the spend was worthwhile, hitting the right buttons, solving the problems etc. And if it isn't working, some evaluation of the lessons learnt and how best to spend the next tranche of public money to solve the issues, particularly by asking those who the money was being spent on - the citizens and consumers - whether things were actually improving and going in the right direction.

Assumption 6: That the lead broadband agency, SEEDA, would have been communicating with the other RDAs to see how things were going with this spend of public money on broadband, to share lessons learnt, good ideas etc, and would know where money was being wasted/well spent.

Some, or possibly all of the assumptions above are beginning to appear entirely inaccurate. After all, our biggest mistake appears to be in assuming that public money is spent in Britain in a business-like manner in order to generate a return on investment, and not with an 'easy come, easy go', "after all it's not _our_ money" attitude.

So, where are we today with our research?

We asked the DTI for a breakdown of monies spent by the RDAs on broadband. They didn't appear to know and passed us on to the RDA Secretariat. The Secretariat don't hold that type of information, and passed us on to the lead broadband agency, SEEDA. Who said they don't know exactly and will get back to us. Watch this space.

Next on the contact list is the National Audit Office.

So, we set to with the help of Google and started looking for RDA press releases, through their websites etc to see what we could find.

Bear in mind, ABC is entirely self-funded so this work is being done by volunteers, not well-paid civil servants who should have had the information at their finger tips - after all, what if an astute MP asks the Minister how much money has been spent, not just on BT, but on all broadband spend? The question could go along the lines of:

To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what the total amount of financial subsidies and grants has been since 1997 for the purpose of extending broadband availability in the UK.

To date, we have identified over £100million spent on broadband marketing, infrastructure etc, but we think we are only just looking at the tip of the iceberg. If you know of a project in your area, please email us the details or a link, and we will add it to the spreadsheet. In the meantime, why not ask YOUR MP to ask that question in the House of Commons? After all, surely the answer is of interest to many of us.