In May 2024, BT migrated a York customer's landline to its Digital Voice platform — the nationwide copper-to-IP switchover that has been a known source of service disruption. The migration severed a wire. The customer, registered on BT's priority list due to serious illness, was left without a working landline while continuing to pay £32.99 a month for the privilege. Two engineers eventually visited in December 2024, identified the fault — a severed wire requiring a cherry picker to reconnect — and left promising to return. They did not. BT then closed the case. When the customer complained again in January, BT closed the case a second time, this time because the landline had been quietly removed from the account despite charges continuing. The line was not restored until September 2025 — roughly 16 months after the fault began. The financial arithmetic is damning. Under Ofcom's Automatic Compensation scheme, telecoms providers must pay £10.34 per day when a reported fault is not fixed within two working days. Applied to the full period of outage, that figure exceeds £4,600. BT's initial goodwill offer was £6.46. After Guardian intervention, BT acknowledged 60 days of compensable outage and settled at £689 — roughly 15% of the theoretical entitlement. BT's defense rests on a gap in the customer's documentation. The company claims it was unaware of the fault until December 2024, and that subsequent months of silence absolved it of further liability. The customer says promises of an ongoing fix led them to wait rather than escalate. Without written records of earlier contacts, the customer cannot prove otherwise — a structural asymmetry that rewards the company's own record-keeping failures. This is a textbook case of what happens when a monopoly-adjacent provider controls both the service and the complaints pipeline. The customer's leverage depends entirely on documenting interactions the company has no incentive to preserve. BT's complaint system closed tickets twice without resolution, yet each closure reset the accountability clock in BT's favour. The priority register — designed to protect vulnerable customers — provided no meaningful protection. Ofcom's compensation framework looks robust on paper but collapses against a provider willing to dispute reporting timelines. The regulator requires providers to pay, but enforcement depends on the customer proving the fault was reported — a burden that falls hardest on precisely the elderly and ill customers the priority register is meant to shield. The Communications Ombudsman exists as a backstop, but the customer accepted BT's settlement rather than face further months of process. The practical lesson is brutally simple: document every interaction in writing, keep timestamps, and escalate in writing immediately when promises go unfulfilled. The systemic lesson is that automatic compensation schemes without automatic fault detection are enforcement theatre — the rules exist, but the company controls the evidence.
