It appears that the Government felt that there might be too much overlap between the EDDC bid and the one for the rest of Devon that EDDC pulled out of to go it alone and that it would not be a good use of public money.
From papers submitted to the Scrutiny Committee:
From a report bt Phil Twiss:
“Update to EDDC scrutiny committee (14th April meeting) re Broadband provision
You will be aware that EDDC submitted a bid for funding to the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) South West Ultrafast Broadband fund in respect of a technical solution (EDDC in conjunction with Broadway Partners) to provide wider provision of Broadband in East Devon “not spots/white areas” where the current Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS)/British Telecommunications (BT), BT commercial or any other provider has any current plans to do so. The application was for £2 million.
I regret that our application was unsuccessful as you will see from the two letters that are appended to this update.
The reasons given for refusal to progress our application are disappointing given there is no comment on the validity or otherwise of the technical solution proposed in the application and mainly relates to tax payers money potentially double funding the project and EDDC’s unwillingness to share data with CDS to avoid this.
EDDC has never been unwilling to share data with CDS as is acknowledged by CDS and as recently as 4th February 2016 in the E Mail below from me to CDS which again sets out our position. BDUK has assumed a view on data sharing without asking EDDC if this was actually the case.
The refusal was appealed by the EDC CEO and the second letter as attached maintains the position where for reasons best known to BDUK suggests that in order to avoid double funding an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) would need to be signed with CDS whereby no details of where, when or how tax payers money could be published by EDDC in terms of openness and transparency. To date EDDC has refused to sign an NDA with CDS for either phase 1 or going in to phase 2 delivery of Broadband where the explanation given is on grounds of commercial confidentiality; difficult to comprehend given no contracts have been agreed for phase 2 delivery of service!”
SO EDDC IS SAYING IT WANTS OPENNESS AND TRANSPARENCY IN CONTRACTS!!!! THE COUNCIL THAT REFUSES TO PUBLISH ANY INFORMATION ON ITS OWN CONTRACTS!!!!
What the government said:
“To avoid using State aid, it would be necessary to ensure that any public funding be provided on the same basis as commercial finance, in other words, via a loan or similar with commercial rates of interest. As such, there may be more appropriate approaches to accessing the necessary project finance, including via commercial lending, or possibly via the proposed Broadband Infrastructure Fund that was announced in last autumn’s Spending Review.”
Click to access 140416-scrutiny-agenda-combined.pdf
So, our rural businesses are still up the creek without paddles.
East Devon Watch 