Building safety paperwork is delaying some installs in flats
If you live in a block of flats in England and you have a full fibre install booked in the next few weeks, your date might move. Some already have.
ISPreview reports that changes to the way the Building Safety Regulator approves work in England are holding up some of Openreach’s new installs in large buildings. Industry feedback it has seen points at “additional consent and assurance requirements” in the new process. Installs that were days away, it says, have been put back by weeks.
What makes that awkward is what the changes were for. Getting fibre into a block of flats usually means drilling through internal walls, and after the regulator updated its process for minor works last year, that fairly routine job picked up a lot of paperwork and cost that nobody could predict. ISPreview reports a deal reached with the Ministry of Housing in July that gives operators a three year dispensation covering exactly that sort of work, small holes for fibre and masts on rooftops, and says it takes effect on 1 September. The fix and the delay are the same policy.
There is nothing to fix at your end. A hold-up like this sits between the engineer and the building rather than on your order, so chasing it will not move it. Two things are still worth doing. Keep your current broadband running until the new line is genuinely working, whatever date you were given, because a cancelled service and a slipped install is the gap nobody wants to sit in. And take it up with the provider you bought from rather than Openreach, which builds the network but does not sell to you.
If your date does move, our guide to what happens on installation day covers what an engineer needs in order to get in and get finished, and broadband compensation is where to look if it keeps slipping. Flats are harder than houses for all of this, which is the whole subject of full fibre in flats. The availability checker is the only thing that knows what reaches your address today.
The honest gap here is the size of it. ISPreview says it is not clear whether this touches every relevant building in England or only some of them, Openreach had not responded when the story went up, and the hope on all sides is that it settles once everyone has learned the new process. A bank holiday weekend will not help anybody find out quickly.