Installing full fibre broadband across the UK could create 1.2m skilled jobs by 2025 while allowing a quarter of workers to be based at home, according to a new report.

Full fibre broadband, which has endured a notoriously slow rollout across the UK, still only covers only 12pc of British homes. It can deliver much faster speeds than copper – up to one gigabit per second – and is around five times more reliable.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr), one of Britain’s most respected independent forecasters, claims speeding up roll out of the technology could add more than £59bn to the economy by 2025.

This, according to founder Douglas McWilliams, would be driven by the creation of more than a million new jobs spread throughout the country, with an increase in home-working allowing more than 270,000 people to move away from major cities into the countryside….