but then you have the same problem who do you target it towards if they say pensioners well i can afford my broadband so do you means test it , nobody likes doing that and some out of pride will miss out rather than fill in the forms.
i think Andy has a point if you are doing this focus on the rural areas who not only have poor public transport to get to a bank they also cannot adequately do it at all on line
And I don’t necessarily disagree there.
But....
Fibre to house in rural areas would be an absurd cost. Over £20bn. All the easy places have already been done.
I suspect that a much cheaper way of doing this will arrive with 5G. Compel mobile phone companies to provide a much higher coverage. 5G might well have killed by 2030 anyway (I think there’s a real chance of this).
With the money needed to buy open reach (£10bn?? More??) plus the £20bn to do fibre to house (which maybe irrelevant by 2030) it seems like a huge amount of money for something we may end up not needing.
Privatise open reach? Yes, that probably makes sense it has an almost total monopoly (and probably has to) so like network rail it probably fits amongst state owned assets best.
But, I can think of way better ways of using a windfall tax of internet based mega companies (good idea) and I can think of cheaper ways of delivering super fast internet, and I can think of way better ways of spending money than giving it to me.
Still, it’s a headline grabbing policy that seems popular on the face of it, and it does recognise the importance of good infrastructure