A PUBLIC consultation to identify rural homes and businesses in Taunton Deane where superfast broadband will not be delivered by commercial companies was this week branded ‘farcical’.

The criticism came from Somerset county councillor John Thorne, who represents many communities on the Blackdown Hills around Wellington.

Cllr Thorne, who is also a Wellington town councillor, said it beggared belief that Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) did not already hold such information.

CDS is looking to award one or more contracts to deliver superfast broadband to rural areas which have so far missed out, following the collapse last year of a similar deal with Gigaclear.

It has up to £56 million of public funds available to invest with private companies to subsidise the cost of building full fibre networks for the tens of thousands of rural properties which currently have slow internet speeds.

CDS is run jointly by Somerset and Devon county councils and has already overseen phase one of a superfast broadband network giving more than 300,000 homes and businesses access to speeds of up to 1 Gbps.

But a second phase which started in 2016 to connect properties which were harder to reach and often isolated quickly began to stall as contractor Gigaclear missed its targets before announcing a year ago that it could not deliver.

Cllr Thorne told the WWN: “CDS waited a year from Gigaclear’s admission before it finally admitted in September that the project had collapsed.

“That was a wasted year, a year where people living and working in rural communities on the Blackdown Hills have had to carry on without access to what is accepted these days as a utility service every bit as important to daily life as is electricity.

“So, CDS has to start over again with a new procurement exercise, but do they do that? No, they wait another two months and then announce this ‘public consultation’ which will waste a further month.

“It will be December at the earliest before they can start looking for new contractors, and yet another year before they announce by December 2020 which providers have been selected.

“Add on another two or three years for the fibre networks to be built, and a huge number of people I represent as a councillor will have been waiting seven years.

“CDS say the consultation is to make sure they know who needs connecting to superfast broadband, but if they do not know by now, having started this process in 2012, then something is more seriously wrong with them than even I had thought.

“They have now failed three times to deliver rural superfast broadband as promised and I am coming round to the view that some critics hold that they should be wound up and the job should be managed directly by Government because CDS is inept.”

CDS said the consultation was needed to allow potential broadband providers to review its mapping of where there were no current or credible plans in the next three years to deliver Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband infrastructure capable of download speeds of at least 30Mbps.

CDS board member and Somerset county councillor David Hall said in a press release announcing the consultation: “Our priority is to ensure that public funding has the biggest impact in increasing coverage and ensuring more areas can benefit from higher speed broadband.”

Cllr Rufus Gilbert, Devon County Council cabinet member for economy and skills and also a CDS board member, said: “This public consultation will enable us to set out the proposed areas where we will need to focus our efforts.”

The deadline for consultation responses is December 10 and submissions should be sent to [email protected] or in writing to OMR consultation, Economy Team, AB2 Lucombe House, County Hall, Exeter, EX2 4QD.

Full details on how to respond are available at https://www.

connectingdevonandsomersetco.uk/cds-2019-omr-public-consultation.