Tees Valley Business Digital Inclusion IntelligenceThe businesses missing
from your digital economy.
Made visible.
Adoptic scores every registered business in your geography for digital presence — without surveys, without consultants, in minutes. Then it plans the intervention, measures the impact, and generates the evidence your funder requires.
Every premises
is connected.
Tees Valley has effectively zero connectivity gap. 0.54% of premises sit below the Universal Service Obligation. 95.37% are Gigabit-capable, 71.33% have full fibre (FTTP), and 99.9% have 4G outdoors.
Gigabit-capable means any technology delivering ≥1 Gbit/s — including DOCSIS 3.1 cable and full fibre. FTTP refers specifically to full-fibre to the premises.
The infrastructure is here. The connection isn't the problem. Adoption is. That's the case for intervention — and the entire reason this register exists.
Source: Ofcom CN Jan 2026 — Tees Valley.
You can't fix what
you can't see.
The businesses that need digital support most are the ones that don't respond to surveys. They don't attend workshops. They don't apply for grants. They are trading in silence — serving customers, employing people, paying rates — and completely undetectable in the digital economy.
The current alternatives are painfully inadequate. Consultants charge £30,000 to £100,000 for reports that take months to produce and are obsolete the day they land. Ofcom maps show coverage — not consequence. Asset management platforms manage infrastructure efficiently but cannot model the human and economic impact of digital investment on the communities it reaches.
The result? UKSPF programmes that cannot demonstrate impact. Interventions targeted at the wrong businesses. Communities losing the economic fabric that holds them together. And funders — DLUHC, DSIT, UKSPF — asking harder questions every reporting cycle.
of Tees Valley premises have ultrafast broadband. The headline suggests a solved problem. The data tells a different story.
- • 31% of businesses in TS23 (Billingham East - Port Clarence) are digitally invisible.
- • 26% of businesses in TS26 (Hartlepool West - Park) are digitally invisible.
- • 13,654 trading businesses — real, operating, serving customers — cannot be found online.
A business in Thornaby with full-fibre broadband and no website is not a connectivity failure. It is an adoption failure. Two different problems requiring two completely different solutions.
Deprivation correlates with digital adoption at r = 0.95 — the strongest relationship in the dataset. Broadband speed correlates at r = −0.18 — essentially zero. The barrier is not infrastructure. It is adoption.
Tees Valley at a glance
Digital Tier Distribution
Adoption by Postcode District
Register headline — BDAF Final Analysis
BDAF final scores × MHCLG IoD 2025 × Ofcom CN Jan 2026 × Google PlacesNot all invisibility
is the same.
We distinguish between businesses that cannot be found digitally and those that were never intended to be found. This distinction matters — conflating the two distorts the true adoption gap and leads to misinformed intervention.
Active CH-registered businesses that are trading but invisible online. Real, operating, serving customers — but not findable via search, GMB, directories, or social media. Each is a direct economic loss and intervention target.
Active CH status but structural indicators of non-trading activity — property vehicles, holding companies, management entities, nominees. Zero consumer-facing digital presence by design, not by neglect.
Companies in formal dissolution, liquidation or administration. Proposal to Strike Off, Active-Proposal to Strike Off, Liquidation, In Administration. Ceasing to exist as legal trading entities.
Companies trading with meaningful digital presence — these are the digitally included businesses of Tees Valley. 62% of the total register.
How we verify digital footprints
Each business is scored 0–5 across these parameters using a probabilistic estimation engine calibrated against sector adoption rates, postcode-level connectivity data (Ofcom), company age, SIC code digital propensity, and company category. Scores are deterministic and reproducible per business. A score of 4–5 = Digitally Active, 2–3 = Partially Visible, 0–1 = Digitally Invisible.
Every business.
Every postcode.
Every gap.
Adoptic makes every registered and trading business in the Tees Valley visible — mapped by postcode, assessed for digital footprint, and connected to the connectivity quality of the infrastructure serving them.
Built on the Infralytics Meaningful Connectivity Audit Platform, it operationalises the finding that behind every postcode is a person — and every business — whose economic participation depends on what connectivity is actually doing for them.
The gap is not connectivity.
It is adoption.
We ran the correlations internally across the register — BDAF Final scores × MHCLG IoD 2025 deprivation deciles × Ofcom Connected Nations broadband data. The result is uncomfortable for conventional policy: neither deprivation nor broadband speed explains digital silence. It is structural — driven by sector and company age — and present in every neighbourhood.
Across 37,769 businesses, IMD 2025 decile correlates at just r = 0.036 with scoring 0–1 (district-level r = 0.418, n = 30). Digital silence is not confined to deprived postcodes — it is present across every deprivation band.
Available broadband speed correlates at r = 0.012 with digital silence — effectively zero. 95.37% gigabit coverage cannot fix a problem it did not cause. The infrastructure is there. It is not being used.
13,654 trading invisible businesses are real, operating, serving customers — but cannot be found online. Concentrated in the most deprived postcodes. Each one represents a direct economic loss and the highest-impact intervention target per pound spent.
IMD 2025 Deprivation vs Digital Silence — Tees Valley
Digital silence rates are strikingly flat across deprivation bands — the exclusion is structural, not socioeconomic. Source: Infralytics BDAF Final × MHCLG IoD 2025.
Strategic Goals
Real-time business landscape
Give every Tees Valley council a real-time, evidence-grade view of its entire business digital landscape.
Separate infrastructure from adoption
Separate infrastructure gaps from adoption gaps at postcode resolution — enabling targeted, cost-effective intervention.
National template
Become the national template for meaningful connectivity business auditing — replicable across all 296 English local authorities.
Peer-archivable finding
Generate a third peer-archivable Infralytics empirical finding from Tees Valley data.
AI economy readiness
Support Tees Valley AI economy readiness assessment linked to the Latos £100m data centre investment.
The businesses missing from
your digital economy are
already in your geography.
Adoptic shows you exactly where they are — in minutes, not months, without a consultant in sight. The question is not whether you can afford Adoptic. It is whether your community can afford another year without it.
Wards on the move.
Confirmed LinkedIn posts, last 30 days.
Your borough is watching. The first ward to post their reality card sets the tone for everyone else.
Self-reported via the Posted on LinkedIn? follow-up. Updates every minute.