Trapped by Talk Talk

vinylmusic

My mother and her husband have always followed my advice when it came to finding the best deals on utilities and telephone
Its quite a long time ago that I had advised them to use Onetel which at the time was a prefix provider
Last year Onetel was taken over by Talk Talk and I realised that they were't using their most economic package so we called TalkTalk to get it changed. They had to be switched from Talk Talk/Onetel to just Talk Talk
Then earlier this year my mothers husband died and to have any control over her account she had to send TalkTalk a bereavement certificate to have her name on the billing.
I went over her account with her and we had to make some changes as we found she wasn't getting the best deal. That was last April.
This week I went over it all again and following advice from this site I advised her she would be better off using BT + Primus+18185
We called TalkTalk to ask them how much notice we needed to give to switch
We were shocked to learn that she was tied in to an 18 month contract. Not from when she started with them but from last April when the last changes were made.
To be free of TalkTalk would cost us £71
aparently they say a contract starts over from scratch whenever you make any changes to your package.
We needed to drop the £9.99 international option there and then because my mother only calls USA for 1 hour each week which would only be 35p a week using 18185.. Having done that I said that doesnt mean that our contract statrs from scratch does it? and we were told it did.
Nothing has ever been said to my mother about 18 months contracts and nothing has ever been signed so I question the legality of this
I would also be curious to know of other peoples experiences of switching from TalkTalk
Can they really get away with it?

lee634

I would seriously challenge that,

Considering no changes had been made to the package apart from the name, i would suggest they are trying just to hold onto the custom,

Take it further and seek legal advice from citizens advice

Incisor

These scumbags need challenging over these fictional 'new contracts'. AFAICS, they cannot unilaterally decide this whenever someone changes a package - all they can do is refuse to give you a change of package until you agree to a new package. A contract takes 2 parties, and if you felt that you were making a variation to the existing package, then that is what you did, in the absence of any agreement to a new contract.

Steve_xx

There's a guy on here from TalkTalk who is mandated to examine queries like this. Do a search on here for him under the following name. He's excellent at sorting things out:

TALKTALK_SUPPORT