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The government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency has posted a contract modification for Openreach’s (BT) £42m (public subsidy) Project Gigabit Call Off 7 contract for Worcestershire (England), which originally aimed to expand their full fibre (FTTP) broadband network to around 22,600 hard-to-reach premises, but will now cover around 23,000.
The additional scope being added to the contract means, according to the notice: “The contract has increased in value from £41,919,176 to £42,488,268. This is a cost change of + £529,092. The awarded premises have increased from 22,598 to 22,983. This is a scope change of +385 premises.”
The tweak comes only a week or so after Openreach finally began to connect the first homes under Call Off 7 (here), which itself follows the original contract award announcement in January 2025 (here). The latest June 2026 data from BDUK indicates that Openreach has so far covered 170 premises under this contract (here), but that is now expected to ramp-up and, as above, has just been slightly expanded.
The contract forms part of Openreach’s wider Single Supplier Framework deal – now valued at c.£1.2bn, which is focused on Cross-Regional (Type C) procurements (no other suppliers tackle Type C). Type C typically reflects remote areas where no or no appropriate market interest has previously been expressed before to the BDUK agency, or areas that have been descoped or terminated from a prior procurement (examples here, here, here and here) – Openreach have recently absorbed several previously failed Project Gigabit contracts with different suppliers.
However, such contracts are not static and their scope, as well as committed levels of public funding, can change over time for a number of different reasons – informed by regular ‘Open Market Reviews’ of existing UK deployment plans. For example, commercial operators may expand or reduce their roll-out plans in the same region(s), which can reduce or grow the scope for public investment within those same areas.
The contracted operator could also find the deployment to be more expensive, or possibly even cheaper, than previously envisaged. Such adjustments may occur due to changes in build costs and interest rates / inflation, as well as any unexpected obstacles to street works or greater efficiencies of build than planned or expected. Suffice to say, there can be various reasons why the contracted scope of related builds and the level of allocated public funding may change over time.
Otherwise, the additional scope for Worcestershire is to be welcomed, albeit with the catch that there may be further changes in the future, which could go in a different direction. So, it’s not always easy to tell what the final picture will be until you actually reach the end.