Summary

  • BDUK’s October snapshot puts 29,820 contracted premises in Openreach’s CO8 “Cheshire” row, up from 18,460 in September. Its footnote says the changed contract now includes Norfolk.
  • A separate Norfolk row still assigns 32,670 contracted premises to CityFibre. The public table identifies two contracts, but gives no address-level split for their Norfolk work.

A county name can be a useful label until the contract crosses the county line. Building Digital UK’s October Project Gigabit table still calls Openreach’s eighth framework call-off “CO8 Cheshire.” It now lists 29,820 contracted premises and 2,650 built contracted premises. A footnote quietly does the heavy lifting: the recent change added premises in Norfolk. In September, the same row showed 18,460 contracted and 990 built. That is an 11,360-premise expansion in reported contract scope and a 1,660-premise rise in recorded builds between rounded snapshots.

Norfolk has not disappeared from the table. Another row carries CityFibre’s Norfolk contract: 32,670 contracted premises and 13,800 built. Read by county name alone, the table invites the wrong question — which of those Norfolk numbers is the Norfolk number? Read by contract, it gives the useful question: which addresses sit with Openreach’s expanded call-off, and which with CityFibre’s separate award? The public aggregate does not answer at address level. It does not establish overlap, either.

The old paperwork explains how the misleading label survived. BDUK’s Openreach framework page, last updated in July, already names Call-Off 8 “Cheshire and North West Norfolk,” but still shows its earlier 18,460 premises and £37.5 million value. The Cheshire contract history records that a previous Freedom Fibre award was terminated by agreement without public funding paid, then replaced through the Openreach call-off. The October table records the next change in scope; it does not publish a revised price. Treating £37.5 million as the price of the enlarged 29,820-premise scope would be arithmetic with a missing contract amendment.

BDUK describes the monthly table as an initial-scope snapshot, rounded to tens and subject to a lag between delivery and data ingestion. It says the figures cannot decide whether contractual milestones have been met. “Built contracted premises” in this table also differs from the programme’s official subsidy-funded delivery statistic. Those definitions matter here because the rise from 990 to 2,650 is a change in the recorded count, not a construction diary. Residents can use the government’s address checker to look up plans for their own premises; the table is a public accounting view of contracts.

The October release makes the geography change visible in a footnote. The next useful disclosure is a revised CO8 breakdown: how many Norfolk addresses moved into it, which addresses belong to each supplier’s award, and whether the enlarged scope changed the contract value. A county label is harmless shorthand until it becomes the public’s only map of who has to build where.

Sources