Fibre delays caused by States cash grab?

Wednesday 31 December 2014

JT’s project to create fibre-optic broadband connections to every home could be delayed because they had to hand back £6 million to the Treasury in the 2015 Budget.

The States-owned utility had to produce the money, which had been earmarked for the fibre project, to help to fill the deficit caused by over-optimistic economic predictions a few years ago.

Now they are reviewing whether with funding being reduced unexpectedly, the Gigabit Jersey project to provide superfast broadband to every home in the island may take longer than the original target date that they set at the end of 2016.

The States ended up with a projected three-year deficit of around £95 million because ambitious growth targets failed to materialise, leaving a gap between income and spending. Former Treasury Minister Philip Ozouf, who set the targets, responded with a short-term package of cuts and raids on utilities to make up the money – properly dealing with the deficit will be one of the big tasks for the new Treasury Minister, Senator Alan Maclean.

In the Unplugged interview in Connect magazine, JT’s Chief Executive Graeme Millar said that they still didn’t know what the full impact would be.

He said: “We have our challenges coming up over the next couple of years. In particular, JT has been asked to provide an extra, and unexpected, £6 million of funds to the government through a dividend, money that had been earmarked for rolling out fibre.

“What that means is that we’re not going to be able to accelerate the programme as much in the next two years as we had planned to do. We simply won’t have the money to do that, and we’re doing a lot of work at the moment to look at the kind of timing and cost implications of that.

“We’re reviewing that now, because of that unexpected change in the funding that we’ve got to deal with.”