BT Cooling Off Period

psychopathbabble

Hello all, apologies in advance for the long post!

I just wanted to check if anyone has a solution to the following.

I placed an order online on 25th February for BT phone and broadband. They confirmed the services would start on March 14th.

On March 14th, at 5.30pm (the engineer time slot was 1-6pm) I got a call saying sorry for the missed appointment, the engineer got stuck fixing something elsewhere. I rescheduled for March 17th. I then got a call the following day to tell me that the broadband would not be activated due to cabling issues and they would keep me informed.

On March 17th, the engineer came (2 hours before the supposed time-slot), installed the phoneline and said there was an issue outside the property and the phone-line wouldn't be working straight away. Later that evening the phoneline started working.

On March 19th, my husband called BT to ask about the broadband activation and we were told the phone line team hadn't told the broadband team that they could activate the broadband as the issue had been fixed, and we made an appointment for Tuesday 22nd March for the broadband service to start.

On Monday 21st March, I had a voicemail from BT saying it's unlikely that the broadband would start the following day, it would be thursday 24th but maybe wednesday 23rd. Either way he would call me back to let me know.

Today, there is no broadband. I went online and it said engineer was booked for wednesday 30th. I called BT to ask why it had been put back again, to 5 weeks from the time i placed the order. She said she wasn't sure but the appointment was there for march 30th. No-one had called me to let me know of this appointment, and I'm fairly certain they would have just pushed the date back again... someone had a look at the BT system and we have an 'out of our control' notice on our account which means they aren't fixing it and could potentially keep pushing the date back for up to a year!

I was so frustrated and fed up with having waited 4 weeks and now potentially at least another week, I said I wanted to cancel everything including the phone line. She said fine and confirmed I wanted to cancel. I was not told there would be a cancellation fee.

I have just had an email from BT confirming the cancellation and that they will be charging £80 for early termination. There is a cooling off period of 14 days but is this from the date of the order, or the date of the service starting? I will pay it if we have to, I am aware that we did terminate the contract early but BT were not fulfilling their side of the contract, no communication, no broadband and no sign of it being activated.

We are the only house in the new build estate that were going with BT, everyone else was going with Sky.

Any legislation or consumer rights I can throw at them?

System

Broadband T& Cs

Cancellation

1. You have a general right to change your mind and cancel the service within the first 14 days from the day after the day we accept your order. If you cancel after we start to provide the service, you must pay the service subscription charge for any period that the service was made available to you and for any use of that service not covered by the subscription charge, up to the date that you told us you wanted to cancel. You will also need to pay any connection or activation charges associated with that service – including the full cost of charges that were discounted or advertised as free as a condition of taking the service on the terms that you agreed when we accepted your order.