To ask the Minister for the Economy to detail the assessment process which deemed some rural areas included in Project Stratum commercially unviable.

Determining commercial viability for the deployment of broadband infrastructure is a matter for private broadband infrastructure providers. However, in order to close the digital divide between rural and urban areas in Northern Ireland my Department has developed Project Stratum, using £150m of public funding secured under the Confidence and Supply Agreement between the DUP and Conservatives, as well as £15m public funding from the Department for Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, to improve connectivity for premises unable to access broadband services of 30 Mbps or greater.

In line with State aid guidance, the intervention area was determined following an Open Market Review (OMR) exercise through June and July 2018, followed by the OMR public consultation, which ran from the start of December 2018 to January 2019. As part of this process, broadband suppliers provided information that indicated the current availability of services, as well as planned commercial services within a three-year timeframe to January 2022. Only premises which, based on the information supplied by private broadband infrastructure providers, would not have access to a broadband service of 30 Mbps or greater by January 2022 were eligible to benefit from Project Stratum.

Details of this process can be found on my Department’s website at https://www.economy-ni.gov.uk/consultations/extending-broadband-across-northern-ireland-project-stratum and also includes an Addendum published on 5 February 2020.

My Department continues to assess premises data made available by suppliers and, in accordance with State aid guidance set out in the National Broadband Scheme 2016, and through continued engagement with Building Digital UK, the division within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport which serves as the National Competency Centre for the project, will seek to ensure that as many eligible premises as possible benefit from this transformational public intervention, more than 97% of which are in rural areas of Northern Ireland.