Fast mobile broadband is something most people take for granted until it’s lost. But for thousands of residents and businesses in remote parts of Scotland, 4G coverage has only recently become a reality, thanks to an award-winning programme to deliver connectivity in areas previously shunned by service providers.
The Scottish Government’s £28.75m 4G Infill Programme (S4GI) delivered 4G signals to 55 rural and island locations between 2018 and 2023 by working with network service providers, infrastructure partner WHP Telecoms, local communities and the UK government.
As a result of the S4GI programme, which was supported with £10.7m from the European Regional Development Fund, more than 2,200 homes and businesses now have high-speed 4G coverage for calls and data. The team also used the power of the Home Office to its advantage by agreeing the joint use of some of the new masts for the Emergency Services Network. Its over-arching success was demonstrated by the project’s victory in the collaboration category of 2024’s Civil Service Awards.
Robbie McGhee, the Scottish Government’s deputy director for digital connectivity – and head of the programme – told Civil Service World’s recent Collaboration Conference that S4GI’s central aim was bringing together diverse interests to enable services the private sector could not deliver on its own. “Scotland’s about a third of the UK land mass, but only 8% of the population. And the population of Scotland tends to be quite concentrated in the central belt,” he says. “When you start to go into the Highlands and Islands, and certainly in island communities, there’s not really a lot of people there, which means that from a mobile network operator point of view, the commercial drivers to deploy infrastructure just aren’t there.”
Telecoms is a “reserved” matter, meaning that provision is the responsibility of the UK government rather than being devolved to Scotland. Nevertheless, McGhee says the economic and social implications for remote areas that lack 4G connectivity were “writ large” for Scottish Government ministers. The impact for business creation, employment and depopulation were major areas of concern. Scottish ministers could not legislate to improve things, so funding was the only lever.
“The particular challenge that we faced was to construct a model that the private sector would go for,”McGhee says. “Because we could go in and say, ‘Well, all these areas need connectivity,’ but if that infrastructure is going to run at a loss for those companies, then it’s not going to be palatable.” The Scottish Government worked with non-departmental public body Scottish Futures Trust and the mobile industry to develop a significant uplift in 4G coverage. Target areas were identified for new masts based on analysis of coverage data, the absence of plans for future commercial investment, and two public consultations.
A stipulation for each of the proposed locations was that masts would only be built if at least one of the mobile network operators – EE, O2, Vodafone and Three – agreed to be an anchor tenant for each site. While the infrastructure would be provided for them, the anchor tenant would take on the running costs of the mast, meaning the programme team effectively had to create individual economic cases for each site.
McGhee says bringing the Home Office on board for the programme was “really pivotal”, with the department’s emergency services communications programme seen from the outset as having the potential to drive lots of efficiencies for S4GI.
“It’s one thing to identify that opportunity. It’s another to follow through on it,” McGhee says. “But we managed to do that, and we got the two programmes working very much in concert. “When we partnered with the Home Office and brought the emergency services angle, we absolutely got industry doing more than I think they otherwise would have done.”
McGhee says the S4GI programme’s collaboration brought together three key groupings: industry; the wider public sector; and communities themselves. He cites WHP Telecoms, which was appointed through a competitive process to acquire sites and design and build the project’s masts, as the “key relationship” from the industry side. “They were the company that would build and operate the various masts for us, but it wasn’t a case of just giving them a list and them going out and building them,” McGhee says.
The individual business case for each mast included a picture of the community it covered, transport routes and tourism sites. WHP worked in tandem with network operators and other industry bodies such as power firms to assemble the studies. In terms of public sector collaboration, McGhee says that as well as the Home Office, the S4GI team also worked extremely closely with local planning authorities to “build the rationale” for the investment and why it mattered.
However, McGhee says the various communities selected to receive phone masts were probably the most important groups earmarked for collaboration. He says that in addition to liaising with landowners through WHP, the programme team also mapped the kinds of community groups that existed in the area to “proactively engage” with them, offset concerns and talk through benefits.
“Undoubtedly, some of that engagement can move people who were potentially in opposition to the programme to actually being in support over time,” he says. Nineteen of the mast sites were in environmentally protected areas which required sensitive planning around placement. In one location the new mast was made to look like a tree, blending in with existing forestation. McGhee points to the identification of “tangible shared objectives” and the development of interpersonal and intergovernmental relations as drivers of success in the programme. But he also acknowledges past and present adversity played a part – despite the additional complications of having to work with restrictions imposed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The S4GI team did a big “lessons learned” analysis of a previous mobile infrastructure project, looking specifically at technical factors that had inhibited the earlier scheme. “A big part of what we did was a kind of design piece with the mobile industry around what they would go for and what they wouldn’t,” McGhee says. “And I think that helped establish the parameters of what would ultimately be viable.” Part way through the programme, 2021’s Scottish Parliament elections returned the Scottish National Party to power on a raft of pledges that included activating 14 new phone masts in the first 100 days of government – a timescale that did not align with the S4GI programme’s plans.
McGhee says the project team worked with WHP to explore whether they could accelerate elements of the existing plans. Although they didn’t quite meet the 100-days target, this did result in a “much-improved” process and more effective deployment in the latter phases of the programme.
“It’s interesting the way in which a bit of adversity can actually breed a better way of doing things,” he says.
Looking back on the whole programme, McGhee says one of his real takeaways is the synergy that the team managed to develop with WHP and the UK government, underpinned by well-defined milestones and benchmarks – and effective governance at programmeboard level. “It really felt as if everyone was entirely invested in getting these masts delivered by a certain point within a certain budget,” he says. “And I think when everybody felt that they had that kind of stake in it, and we really had the shoulder to the wheel to deliver those ambitions, really good things happened.”