Openreach today bucked the prevailing economic trend by creating 5,300 new UK-based engineering jobs, including at least 295 in the East of England, to be filled during 2021.
The new roles, across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, will enable the company to continue improving service levels across its existing networks, whilst building and connecting customers to its new, ultrafast, ultra-reliable ‘Full Fibre’ broadband network at a record pace.
The expansion includes more than 2,500 full-time jobs in Openreach’s own service and network build divisions, as well as an estimated 2,800 positions in its UK supply chain, through partners such as Kelly Group, Kier, MJ Quinn and Telent*.
The UK’s largest digital infrastructure firm has separately made a commitment to upgrade all 27,000 Openreach vehicles – the second largest commercial fleet in the UK – to electric by 2030.
The announcement comes as the firm hit a record build rate for its Full Fibre broadband programme – which aims to reach 20 million homes and businesses by the mid-to-late 2020s – on the assumption we obtain the required critical enablers. Openreach engineers are now delivering faster, more reliable connectivity to another 40,000 homes and businesses every week, or the equivalent of a home every 15 seconds.
Full fibre build is already underway in dozens of locations across the East of England, including Basildon, Billericay, Brentwood, Chelmsford and Norwich and more hard-to-reach areas including Wickford in Essex, Cranfield in Bedfordshire, Ely in Cambridgeshire, Caister-on-Sea, Kings Lynn in Norfolk and Haverhill in Suffolk.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) have found that a nationwide Full Fibre broadband network would boost UK productivity by £59 billion by 2025 – and updated modelling suggests it could enable nearly one million more people to access employment including over 300,000 carers, nearly 250,000 older workers and 400,000 parents. The economic benefit to the East of England alone could be up to £5.38 billion.
The pandemic has accelerated changes in working patterns and, with full fibre, nearly two million more people than previously estimated could also choose to work from home in the long term, reducing transport and housing pressures in big cities and boosting local and rural economies across the country.
Openreach regional director, Laura Whelan, said: “As a major employer and infrastructure builder, we believe Openreach can play a leading role in helping the UK to build back better and greener. Our Full Fibre network build is going faster than ever and we’re now looking for people across the East of England to build a career with Openreach and help us upgrade broadband connections and continue improving service levels throughout the region. We’re also investing in our supply chain, which will support the creation of thousands of jobs based all over the UK.
“We know the network we’re building can deliver a host of green benefits – from consuming less power to enabling more home working and fewer commuting trips – and we’re going to take that a step further, by committing to build and maintain that network using state of the art electric vehicles across our 27,000-strong fleet. We’ll have completely transitioned to EVs by 2030.”
