Plus Net home phone suspended

ASHINGDON

My father is in his 90s and uses his home phone for everything he pays by DD and never misses a payment regardless. Plus net have suspended his phone services this month as he went over the £50 a month cap they have imposed on home phone contracts leaving him without access to his support services etc. They sent an email to him advising this,  as you can imagine at his age he does not regularly read emails. 

I am meet with complete apathy at plus net even when escalating apparently this is wide policy, surely they have some duty to elderly customers who rely on this service?  

victor2

ASHINGDON said:

My father is in his 90s and uses his home phone for everything he pays by DD and never misses a payment regardless. Plus net have suspended his phone services this month as he went over the £50 a month cap they have imposed on home phone contracts leaving him without access to his support services etc. They sent an email to him advising this,  as you can imagine at his age he does not regularly read emails. 

I am meet with complete apathy at plus net even when escalating apparently this is wide policy, surely they have some duty to elderly customers who rely on this service?  

Welcome to the forum!

If he's happy to pay the £50, can't you just go into his account and increase the cap to enough to cover the likely monthly cost?

That would sort out the current month, but do you need to investigate the costs he ran up and see if they can be reduced in the future?

iniltous

Why isn’t he on an unlimited call plan , that’s much less than £50 a month.
FWIW , Plusnet are not staying in the telephony game and any new PN customers are broadband only , they actively look to move telephony customers away from PN , it may be worth considering a different provider for the long term as eventually PN won’t offer telephony ,

 Plusnet will arrange a free migration to BT/EE for customers that want to keep their phone service .

Mark_d

I would make a formal complaint to Plusnet.  They have a duty towards vulnerable customers.

However the £50 cap is there to stop people running up unmanageable debts.  Is you father's bill usually around this high?  It looks extreme to me.  My £4.50 per month Lebara contract covers all my regular phone calls and also the occasional international call.  I never pay a penny more than this on phone calls.

littleboo

They only have a duty to vulnerable people if they have been told that someone is vulnerable. We don't know if Plusnet have him registered as vulnerable.  

la531983

littleboo said:

They only have a duty to vulnerable people if they have been told that someone is vulnerable. We don't know if Plusnet have him registered as vulnerable.  

But then even if they have been told, they cant win here, surely the point of a cap is to stop people running up huge bills by scam calls etc etc and if they didnt do this in a different case someone else could moan they DIDNT cap it.

elsien

If your dad isn’t up in the habit of reading emails when information about his contracts are being sent by email perhaps you need to set something up where you check them with him. There may be other important information he is missing as well. 

It’s not good enough to say “sorry I don’t read my emails” if he has not requested information in other formats.  

Lorian

https://www.plus.net/help/phone/about-phone-credit/

How to top up is there

But as someone said consider the inclusive call plan options they may well save him money.

Neil_Jones

ASHINGDON said:

My father is in his 90s and uses his home phone for everything he pays by DD and never misses a payment regardless. Plus net have suspended his phone services this month as he went over the £50 a month cap they have imposed on home phone contracts leaving him without access to his support services etc. They sent an email to him advising this,  as you can imagine at his age he does not regularly read emails. 

I am meet with complete apathy at plus net even when escalating apparently this is wide policy, surely they have some duty to elderly customers who rely on this service?  

This sort of thing comes up fairly regularly.

The easy solution is to "top up" as you only get £50 of credit, but if you're suspended because you've hit that limit then you're clearly on the wrong package.

I would change to an unlimited call package, which effectively caps it to the cost of the package (£12.69 + rental).

Also age is not a barrier to email so I wouldn't use that excuse.  Maybe you should change it to one you use instead.

Not sure why you think this is Plusnet's problem as the agreement says if you hit the cap, you're suspended for the rest of the month.  If its a one off okay but considering Plusnet charge 32.47p per call and then 21.17/25.40 (mobile), you can see how this racks up.  A ten minute call to a landline would be £2.44/£2.86. That's only five calls a month.

molerat

You need to find out what he is doing to run up this size of bill.  Unlimited landline calls and 2000 mins mobile is £12.69 pm, much more sensible unless he is calling premium rate numbers.

https://www.plus.net/broadband/extras/call-plans/

What more do you expect them to do ?

Don't worry, we'll drop you an email to let you know when you're close to going over your credit threshold.

We'll only calculate your usage charges every 24 hours, but once we've done this calculation and discovered you're over your credit threshold, the next call you make will go through to us and you'll need to pay a one-off charge of £5.76 (the amount it costs us to get everything back to normal on your line). We'll add that to your next bill.

https://www.plus.net/help/phone/about-phone-credit/