BT Group Chief Executive Philip Jansen spoke to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the Labour Party’s announcement that they will nationalise UK broadband. Labour said the cost of nationalising parts of BT would be set by Parliament and paid for by swapping bonds for shares. Mr Jansen disputed how much it would cost, warning it wouldn’t be “short of £100 billion” and could be a “liability” for BT pensioners.

He told the BBC: “These are very, very ambitious ideas and the Conservative Party have their own ambitious idea for full fibre for everyone by 2025.

“How we do it is not straight forward. It needs funding, it is very big numbers, so we are talking 30 to 40 billion pounds per building.

“If you are giving it away over an eight year time frame it is a another £30 or £40 billion.

“You are not short of £100 billion.”

He continued: “Then we start getting into who owns it and would it be owned by the public sector.

“The mechanism for that is not straight forward because we have a liability to our pensioners which we see as a responsibility of £60 billion.

“We have hundreds of thousands of people who used to work for BT who have pensions that they rely on.

“We’ve got to make sure we’re generating the returns for those pensioners.”

Labour said it would nationalise Openreach – the digital network arm of the country’s biggest broadband and mobile phone provider – as well as parts of BT Technology, BT Enterprise and BT Consumer.

Leader Jeremy Corbyn will say in a speech later today: “It’s time to make the very fastest full-fibre broadband free to everybody, in every home in every corner of the country.

“By creating British Broadband as a public service, we will lead the world in using public investment to transform our country, reduce people’s monthly bills, boost our economy and improve people’s quality of life.”

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Mr Jansen told the Today show: “You’ve got a big capital investment, say £30 to £40 billion.

“If you’re giving it away, free for example, that’s probably another £5 billion a year on revenue that OpenReach currently gets from its customers.

“So you’ve got that big investment to make, and from my perspective, what’s really important to me is that my employees, our colleagues at BT and OpenReach, our shareholders and our pensioners.

“Remember that the BT Group has over 100,000 people working every single day.

“And also very very importantly, for our shareholders, because ultimately they own the company.”

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