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Legislative proposals to address broadband rollout in leasehold flats: analytical annex

Updated 18 December 2025

Applies to England and Wales

Data tables

Coverage by property type (England and Wales)

Property Type	Premise code	Total properties	Number of properties with gigabit	Percentage with gigabit
Self-contained flat (MDUs)	RD06	5,958,380	4,740,032	79.6%
Detached	RD02	5,650,592	4,532,976	80.2%
Semi-detached	RD03	7,302,032	6,669,350	91.3%
Terraced	RD04	7,517,889	6,931,717	92.2%
Residential other		366,200	201,030	54.9%
All residential	R	26,795,093	23,075,105	86.1%
Commercial	C	1,696,542	1,083,029	63.8%

Coverage by rurality (England and Wales)

Rural Urban Classification	RUC code	Total properties (Residential)	Total properties (MDUs)	Number of properties with gigabit (Residential)	Number of properties with gigabit (MDUs)	Percentage with gigabit (Residential)	Percentage with gigabit (MDUs)
Smaller rural: Further from a major town or city	RSF1	984,806	27,609	490,504	12,353	49.8%	44.7%
Smaller rural: Nearer to a major town or city	RSN1	1,293,984	47,174	752,774	25,416	58.2%	53.9%
Larger rural: Further from a major town or city	RLF1	856,552	88,230	572,086	47,696	66.8%	54.1%
Larger rural: Nearer to a major town or city	RLN1	1,659,406	125,125	1,292,005	76,254	77.9%	60.9%
Urban: Further from a major town or city	UF1	1,919,739	330,079	1,628,867	227,339	84.8%	68.9%
Urban: Nearer to a major town or city	UN1	20,080,564	5,340,153	18,338,854	4,350,967	91.3%	81.5%
Missing		42	10	15	7	35.7%	70.0%
All Rural classifications	R	4,794,748	288,138	3,107,369	161,719	64.8%	56.1%
All Urban classifications	U	22,000,303	5,670,232	19,967,721	4,578,306	90.8%	80.7%

Coverage by ownership type (England and Wales)

Ownership type	Total properties	Number of properties with gigabit	Percentage with gigabit
Leasehold MDUs	3,252,813	2,565,035	78.9%
Freehold MDUs	2,705,567	2,174,997	80.4%
All MDUs	5,958,380	4,740,032	79.6%

1.1 Data sources

We used a range of data sources to produce the analysis.

• The premises base used and building classifications were derived from the Ordnance Survey AddressBase Premium product.
• The rurality of premises were taken from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2021 Rural-Urban Classifications
• ONS National Statistics UPRN Lookup (October 2025) (Epoch 121) was used for geographic locations
• HM Land Registry dataset on Registered Leases was used to identify leasehold flats
• The May 2025 Open Market Review (OMR) publication from BDUK was used to determine current connectivity and future connectivity of properties.

1.2 Data coverage

For this analysis the coverage was shaped by Ofcom’s premises base. This premises base covers 28.66 million properties in England and Wales, of which 5.96 million are self-contained flats.

Data on connectivity is acquired by BDUK from supplier returns. Not all suppliers will provide data returns so there may be gaps in the coverage data. The connectivity data may therefore differ from other reporting by Ofcom or ThinkBroadband for this reason.

1.3 Data collection period

 The connectivity data was collected by BDUK in May 2025. Data on registered leases was correct as of August 2025.

1.4 Accuracy and reliability

Whilst each data supplier has undertaken extensive checks on their data, errors associated with the large-scale processing of geographic data may be present.

When joining registered leases onto the rest of the data we had to make several assumptions. Registered leases described property such as “land near 29 Acacia Road”. These may have been assigned an address as described in the methodology.

Where a registered lease refers to a building we assume that all premises within the building are leasehold properties. Although the total number of leasehold flats corresponds with figures reported elsewhere, there may be instances where leasehold flats have not been correctly identified.

2.1 Methodology

2.1.1 Address matching

The Ofcom premises base was reproduced using the approach detailed in the methodology document that accompanies their Connected Nations report.

Using the unique property reference numbers (UPRNs) in the Ofcom premises base we joined on the building classifications, geographic regions, rural-urban classifications and the registered leases.

Prior to joining, the data on Registered Leases was cleaned to drop duplicate entries and remove leases for non-residential or commercial properties. Leases were dropped if they were for airspace, garages, carparking, parking spaces, pipelines, transformers, substations, exchanges or cell sites.

The data contained a mix of “child” unique property reference numbers (UPRNs), “parent” UPRNs and properties where UPRNs were missing. Where a parent UPRN was present in the data we assumed that all “child” premises associated with the parent were leasehold properties.

856k leases had no UPRN in their record. We matched on postcodes and then used a bigram-based fingerprint hash for fuzzy entity matching to link to addresses and UPRNs. Using this approach, we were able to match 505k premises to a UPRN record.

Of the 7.6 million records in the registered leases data we were able to match 3.4 million to a UPRN belonging to a flat.

2.1.2 Analysis

We identified MDUs using the building classification code “RD06”/self-contained Flat.

A count of the total premises with the flag current gigabit was used to measure gigabit coverage. Future gigabit was measured if premises had a flag of current gigabit or future gigabit.

3.1 Quality Management

DSIT’s quality assurance strategy sets out minimum standards for quality assurance for analytical products and documentation, as well as the roles and responsibilities across the organisations. The quality assurance strategy meets the requirements of the Government Functional Standard for Analysis.