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The CEO of Openreach, Clive Selley, has backed the Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Barbara Janke after she proposed an amendment to the new Renters’ Rights Bill (RRB) that would allow tenants to request the right for a gigabit broadband installation, while ensuring that consent cannot be “unreasonably refused” by landlords (they’d get 28 days to make a decision).
The availability of gigabit broadband was mandated for new build homes in December 2022, but older properties – particularly large residential buildings (Multi-Dwelling Units) – still require network operators to secure the permission of freeholders before they can deploy new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) lines. This can become particularly tedious when landlords refuse access, fail to respond to a request, or where it’s unclear who the freeholder for a building actually is.
NOTE: The Renters Rights Bill currently only applies to England. Openreach has so far extended their FTTP broadband network to nearly 18 million UK premises and aims to reach 25 million by December 2026, before then pushing on up to 30m by 2030.
Openreach estimates that there are approximately 1,040,000 premises in such buildings across the country for which this issue applies and over 780,000 of those are said to be “at risk of no coverage from us or any other provider“, although it’s difficult to verify these figures.
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At present the RRB hands a lot of new rights to tenants (gov summary), including the right to request a pet in the property (alongside a supporting requirement for pet insurance). But it does not allow them to request an upgrade to faster broadband connectivity, and this can sometimes leave whole buildings and related tenants trapped on older copper lines.
Clive Selley said (Yorkshire Post – paywall):
“It is a huge number of people who could get full fibre because we have the infrastructure outside the building but we haven’t been able to secure the legal right to come into the building and do the plumbing. Fibre is thinner than a hair on a human head, the sheathing is white and when you put it against a white wall, if you are my age you can’t see it. Adding fibre is very, very non-intrusive, it is not like plumbing in a load of pipes.
A surprising number of blocks are owned by people who don’t live anywhere near – some are technically owned by a Post Office box in the British Virgin Islands. Often they are just overseas investors, sometimes in tax havens. Or they are just owned by landlords who don’t want the bother but it is denying renters the ability to get full fibre broadband and our commitment is to get that just about everywhere in the UK.”
However, there are of course two sides to every story, and this is not a new proposal. The previous Conservative Government rejected the idea because they feared that allowing broadband operators to enter premises without a landlord’s permission would “significantly and adversely impact on the rights of property owners and occupiers”.
The issue of automatic upgrade rights in MDUs sounds fair and logical, but rivals have already warned that this must not result in a situation that grants special access to Openreach – without also affording opponents a fair level of comparable accessibility. The latter could risk handing the incumbent an unfair competitive advantage (here), which is something the RRB must be careful to avoid.
In addition, property owners also have concerns that must be balanced in all this (i.e. insurance, damage to property, security, safety (e.g. fire, asbestos) and other liabilities etc.), which is because upgrading copper lines to fibre in MDUs is often a bit more involved than it may seem (it’s not always minor work) and not everybody may want that.
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Some landlords may also have exclusive agreements in place with rival network operators, which would be put at risk. Similarly, it’s also possible that some buildings may run into the same problem as we’ve seen in many UK streets over the past few years, with multiple operators trying to conduct work on the same site – causing a lot of disruption.
Suffice to say, network operators and the government are walking a bit of a tightrope in terms of the rights of freeholders and leaseholders, although it remains to be seen whether the proposed amendment gains enough support to be included in the final bill. But if it does, then it must be done in a fair and balanced way.