PRESS RELEASE
Thursday 21st February 2006

Grove Village To Become First Wireless Community

Tenants living on the Plymouth Grove Housing PFI (Grove Village) in Ardwick, Manchester, will become part of the first “wireless community” after Grove Village Ltd agreed to fund low cost, wireless broadband connectivity to local tenants.

The Digital Inclusion Project, which aims to bridge the digital divide between the information rich - those who have access to the internet - and the information poor - those who have not - has been pioneered by Grove Village Ltd, the consortium set up to deliver the PFI for Manchester City Council.

The Grove Village partners and contractors – Harvest Housing Group, Gleeson, Powerminster and Nationwide Building Society – have now agreed to fund the £35,000 start-up costs of the project which will include the use of wireless broadband, leading to affordable home computing and the provision of a community-based web portal.

The project will empower a community where many people were previously denied the option of accessing digital information in their day-to-day lives because they could not afford to have internet access at home.

Driven by Grove Village Residents’ Association, who have been seeking funding for estate-wide internet access for three years, the project has now been made a reality thanks to the Grove Village consortium.

The Digital Inclusion Project will:

  • Make broadband connectivity more available, accessible and affordable (around £5 a month) over the entire estate.
  • Provide easy-to-use, low cost home computing – tenants will be able to purchase, at a fixed monthly fee, a monitor, keyboard and mouse for around £200.
  • Promote digital literacy – by introducing an ICT skills and training programme for the Plymouth Grove Area.

Digital Inclusion will enable the Harvest Housing Group, through its subsidiary Manchester and District Housing Association – who provide the housing management function on the estate – to communicate with tenants through the wireless network and boost the service it currently provides.

Ian Perry, Chairman of Grove Village Ltd, said: “Housing PFI is not just about the bricks and mortar benefits we can bring to a community, it is also about wider regeneration, developing new opportunities and creating sustainable communities.

“We want to provide social housing tenants at Grove Village with the opportunity to access the internet at a low cost. We are delighted to fund this pioneering and innovative project.”

Dave Tomlinson, Chairman of the Grove Village Residents’ Association, said: “We are extremely grateful to the Grove Village consortium for agreeing to fund the project. If it wasn’t for their intervention, we would have found it very difficult to raise the money needed and local people would continue to be unable to afford broadband internet access.”

Grove Village Ltd is working with Valueworks, a Wigan-based ICT (Information and Communication Technology) company, to deliver the Digital Inclusion project.

ENDS

For more information please contact Becki Dixon at IPB Communications on 0161 976 1414 or 0161 975 4309.