Our PR campaign to call for the early release of the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme Interim vouchers generated over 220 items of coverage, from Page 3 of The Times, to featuring on London Evening Standard’s Tech & Science daily podcast and appearing on the 6 o’clock STV news. Our story reached over 11 million people. The campaign was valued in the region of £425K-£1.2M.

Thank you to everyone who showed support for the campaign by sharing it online. Communities outside of Finderne shared it too. It brought us together to push for better.

We have since met with MSP’s Paul Wheelhouse and Richard Lochhead and other Scottish Government officials to push for better and flexibility on the release of interim vouchers. Here is what we have been told: “…as both interim and main vouchers meet our policy commitment to provide access to super fast broadband by the end 2021, we are not proposing any changes at this stage”. We have however always said we will keep the scheme under review. We are still told that the full picture for the delivery of Lot 1 will be known and released in ‘summer’.

As of 16th March, 155 properties in Finderne qualify for interim vouchers. The list of properties is being updated everyday so we encourage you all to check the status of your households at the link below.

Meanwhile, we are exploring how FDT may help residents to link with Internet Service Providers to use their vouchers to get a better connection once funding is made available and as always, will keep in touch as things develop.

If you have any questions, please get in touch via the link at the bottom of this email.

Check your postcode here.