Better Broadband: An important reminder

An important reminder in relation to the Better Broadband initiative, plus clarification of the VAT situation.

To all those who supported this important community project,

Please Do Not Delay! Failure to Validate your Voucher quickly could result in the Voucher expiring and the community upgrade being lost. Please act now, it takes less than two minutes.

The next vital step for those who signed up by pledging your Broadband Gigabit Vouchers is to Validate your Voucher. You should have received an email on, or around 17th March, from GOV.UK from this email address:
gigabit.vouchers@notifications.service.gov.uk.

There will be a link in the email which you will need to click on to check and agree to the Terms & Conditions and then validate your voucher.

Can’t find the email? Check your junk / spam folders in case the email ends up in there.

The faster we all validate our vouchers, the more quickly we will receive a delivery date for the Full Fibre Ultrafast Broadband service.

Tell your friends and neighbours, in person, by email or social media and check if they need help with this. 

Many thanks
Richard Champness

Chair, Bury Parish Council

Please see the below for an example of how the first part of the email from GOV.UK will look. If you require any assistance, please email community broadband lead richard.champness@buryparishcouncil.org.uk  or our Clerk Mike Simpson clerkburyparishcouncil@gmail.com

This email is intended for Mr XXXXX

Openreach has requested a Gigabit Voucher on your behalf to offset the cost of full fibre broadband installation at your premises.
In order for us to issue the voucher, we need you to confirm that you have agreed to a contract for a new gigabit-capable service – order number CFPXXXXXXXXXXXX

Please click on the link below to view and accept the terms of the scheme. We cannot issue your Gigabit Voucher until you confirm these details.
(Link)

(If the link above does not work when clicked, please copy and paste it into your browser)

If you do not give your agreement within 28 days of this email, DCMS may cancel your supplier’s request for a voucher

VAT Clarification
Following an enquiry from a local business concerning some misleading information in the voucher email from gov.uk DCMS, please see below (excerpt from Openreach email) confirmation that no VAT on the infrastructure upgrade to full fibre will be charged to those validating any business or residential voucher in our Bury Community scheme.

‘Our community fibre projects (CFP) are VAT exempt. We don’t charge VAT on our CFP projects unless we are contracting with property developers.
 As the project cost is fully covered by vouchers, there will be no infrastructure cost to charge VAT on anyway. The DCMS emails are a standard template that we cannot change. It may be that some of the other providers providing the same type of programme do charge VAT”.