The gigabit voucher scheme has stopped taking new projects
If the fibre builders have not reached your road and you were hoping a government grant might help pay to get a line to your door, that route has shut to new projects. As reported by ISPreview on 2 September, the government’s Building Digital UK agency has confirmed that the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme is no longer taking new voucher project submissions.
The scheme is not gone yet, and the difference matters. ISPreview reports that since 31 August suppliers can no longer put new voucher projects to the agency for the few areas still open to it. Projects already under way carry on until the scheme itself closes on 31 March 2028. The vouchers were worth up to £4,500 a premises, according to the same report, and were meant for rural and some poorly served urban homes and businesses that had only much slower speeds available and no near term plan for a gigabit build.
What it means if fibre has not reached you
Nothing changes on the line you already have. What has gone is one of the options. A voucher project was how a handful of neighbours in an expensive spot could get a supplier to build out to them with most of the cost covered, and new ones of those cannot be started under this scheme now.
Worth knowing before you write the idea off: ISPreview notes that closing the national scheme does not stop local authorities and devolved governments running their own voucher schemes with their own money, so your council is the next place to look. The other route is slower. Whether a subsidised build is already heading your way is the question, and only the availability checker knows what reaches your address today. Our guide on what to do when fibre is not coming goes through what is left when it is not.
What to watch next
The voucher sat inside the wider Project Gigabit programme, supported by £210m of its £5bn, per ISPreview, against a target of around 99% of UK premises by 2032 and roughly 91% reached so far. That last few per cent is exactly where vouchers used to do their work. The same report puts the total helped by the scheme and the ones before it at 384,810 premises, and says the government may take a different approach to whatever gaps are left once Project Gigabit finishes.
That is the honest uncertainty here. What replaces the voucher, if anything does, has not been announced, and this closure has so far been reported by ISPreview alone. We wrote last month that Project Gigabit is about a third of the way through the homes it has under contract, so there is time for that decision to be made. Nobody has said yet which way it will go.