-

Progress since September 2021

In the Parish Council’s first update on the village full fibre initiative in September 2021, I outlined that myself and a number of other members of the community were working with Openreach to progress with one single Community Fibre Partnership (CFP) to cover the whole of Hartley Wintney and the neighbouring localities in Hartfordbridge, Elvetham, West Green and Phoenix Green.  This project would cover roughly 2600 properties and would cost around £1.8m to complete, all of which was expected to be funded from the Government’s voucher scheme and Openreach.

Since September progress has been slow.  We were informed in December by Openreach that many of the 2600 properties in our CFP would be going into Openreach’s Rural Build Programme and therefore would not be eligible to go into the village CFP.  This led to a revision of the scope of the CFP to 420 properties followed shortly by a request to Openreach to produce a new build quote.  Since the start of the year, there has been little news from Openreach on the project.  We were informed that Openreach had put all FCPs (Fibre Community Partnerships)  the new name for CFPs for Hampshire on hold as the Department for Culture Media and Sport has started the tender process for Hampshire for what is known as Project Gigabit. We’ve also been made aware that it is possible that some of the 420 properties we had identified for our village FCP could be swept up into Project Gigabit.

So, the current situation is that we are on hold. In April Openreach’s new financial year starts and I’ve been informed that we should find out close to this date which of the 2200 properties identified for the Rural Build will be in projects in the coming 12 months, hopefully at the same time we will find out about the outcome of the tender which will then allow us to finalise the FCP that is on hold.

We are still capturing details from local residents who are interested in the scheme, and have around 150 properties registered.  If you would like to register your details please complete and submit the the form below.

Many Thanks

Cllr. Stuart Elborn (Project Lead for the HW Full Fibre Project)