B4RN secures new £100k Ribble Valley funding

B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), has secured new grant funding of £100,000 to help them reach more villages in Lancashire’s rural Ribble Valley area.

The funds will help deliver high speed full fibre broadband to every property in the area.

The rural broadband ISP is a community benefit society that has deployed their 10Gbps capable full fibre (FTTP) network to 25,000 premises across England.

B4RN is a preapproved provider for the Government Gigabit Voucher Scheme and the company has been through a value for money test as part of this decision.

According to details released during a recent meeting of the Ribble Valley Council, the new funding has been approved to support several of B4RN’s deployments.

The application received from B4RN for Grindleton and Sawley was for the maximum £50,000 grant funding.

The approved allocations include a £50,000 grant toward one of B4RN’s deployments in the Ribchester area, as well as another £50,000 toward similar deployments in the rural communities of Bolton by Bowland and Paythorne.

The new investment forms part of £675,000 that has been committed to various local community projects under the Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF) – this rural scheme sits alongside the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (SPF), intervention E15 – Investment and support for digital infrastructure for local community facilities.

Not all of B4RN’s applications received funding, however.

As a result, the operator’s application for an additional £50,000 to support their deployment of a new full fibre broadband network across Grindleton and Sawley was not approved.

The project team for the rejected application now have most of the wayleaves in place and have 183 requests for connection.

It has now secured £492,500 worth of funding from the Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS) and raised £103,900 of private investment from local residents and businesses.

With the support of the grant, the project team could have delivered on phase 1 of the project well in advance of the cut-off of March 2025 for this funding.

The grant would have been used to cover part of the cost of the initial network installation and would therefore meet the timescales of the grant funding.