Summary

  • Cambridgeshire’s CityFibre row fell from 18,230 to 17,600 contracted premises between BDUK’s September and October snapshots, while built contracted premises rose from 14,330 to 14,500.
  • BDUK attributes a decrease in contracted scope to new financial models changing the number of eligible premises in the intervention area. It publishes no address-by-address account of the change in this table.

One column walks backwards; the other walks forwards. In BDUK’s September Project Gigabit table, CityFibre’s Cambridgeshire contract had 18,230 premises in its initial scope and 14,330 recorded as built. The October table gives 17,600 and 14,500. That is 630 fewer contracted premises and 170 more built in the rounded public snapshots. The fibre did not read the spreadsheet and turn around.

BDUK’s footnote supplies the mechanism: new financial models altered the number of eligible premises in the intervention area. It applies the same footnote to Durham, whose displayed contracted total stayed at 4,440 across these two releases. For Cambridgeshire, the net change is visible. The homes behind it are not. An aggregate cannot show whether an individual address moved into a commercial plan, a deferred category, a changed cost calculation or some other status.

This is a moving contract with a longer history. BDUK’s Cambridgeshire guidance says expanded commercial rollout led BDUK and CityFibre to redesign the award in May 2026. It describes around 35,000 premises supported by up to £77 million, against an original 2023 award for up to 45,000 at £69 million. Those broad guidance figures describe the redesigned award; the monthly table counts only its initial contracted scope. Putting 35,000 and 17,600 into a subtraction is the sort of confident arithmetic that produces a very wrong headline.

BDUK says its monthly counts are rounded to the nearest ten and carry a variable delay between delivery and data ingestion. Its built count tracks contracted premises reached by a gigabit-capable connection, a different measure from the programme’s official subsidy-funded delivery statistics. The release supplies no revised contract price and no list of the addresses represented by the net 630 change. Those records would show what the financial model actually moved.

The immediate public question is practical. A homeowner sees a line on an eligibility map, while the state and supplier see a financial model and a contract schedule. When the model moves the line, publish the before-and-after address status and the reason for the move. Otherwise a footnote carries the whole accountability burden, and it is a small footnote.

Sources