Virgin Media increased monthly price after moving home

The_Boss

Hi all,

Earlier this year we renewed our Virgin Media contract at our old address. Virgin Media made several errors in not correctly applying the new contract price, which took several months to resolve satisfactorily (with them even refusing to acknowledge the contract they had sent to us clearly stating what was agreed). Eventually a new contract was agreed from March 2025 with the original discounts applied, with the minimum period and discounts expiring in September 2026.

We moved home at the start of October (roughly 1 mile away, same postcode area) and the monthly cost has now increased by roughly £11/month and they have started a new contract. This runs for 18 months from October 7, but it lists the discounts we agreed earlier this year as only valid until September 2026, therefore meaning we would have 7 months of sky high prices once those end and not be able to do anything about those.

From what I read on the website both before our move and just now we should only have been charged £20 costs for the house move. I can see no mention of price hike or new contract. Unfortunately the package is in my partner's name so she got the emails and I've only seen what has happened. Are they able to impose this increase and new contract? There was a 14 day cancellation period in the contract they sent (we are out of this period now) but not sure it would have applied since we already had a contract with them.

I've raised a complaint with Virgin Media and am awaiting a response.

JSmithy45AD

Sounds like due to the earlier mess they made of her account they simply cancelled it and restarted. Wait and see what they say but don't let it slide.

The_Boss

JSmithy45AD said:

Sounds like due to the earlier mess they made of her account they simply cancelled it and restarted. Wait and see what they say but don't let it slide.

Thanks. So I take it that it's correct that VM shouldnt have just decided to start a new contract when we moved?

JSmithy45AD

The_Boss said:

JSmithy45AD said:

Sounds like due to the earlier mess they made of her account they simply cancelled it and restarted. Wait and see what they say but don't let it slide.

Thanks. So I take it that it's correct that VM shouldnt have just decided to start a new contract when we moved?

Nope, you've seen their T&Cs yourself, you'll have to await their response. I can't see it being a problem and you may even profit from it if the accounts so messed up that they have to restart it (again).

Bigphil1474

OP, we had a similar issue when we moved. We were 6 months into an 18 month contract, and thought we'd just move the last 12 months contract to our new property. It appears, however, that they continued the contract for the discounted period, leaving 12 months discounted, but started a new 18 month contract for the actual services. Got a bit of a shock a couple of months ago when they said our contract price would be double for the last 6 months. Fortunately I was able to renegotiate a new 18 month contract at the old price to tie it all back together. They didn't seem to know what they'd done either. 

The_Boss

We have finally resolved this, months later (owing to a bereavement and general Virgin Media incompetency things got delayed).

The whole process of resolving this has been as soul destroying as when we had another contract issue with them just over a year ago (when we renewed our contract at an agreed rate). Back then we received a contract, then they carried on billing us at a higher rate and claimed there was no contract in place even when we sent them the actual contract (needed UK based support to step in to resolve and apologise for how this had happened, when we eventually were able to get them to look at it).

Examples of issues we experience in resolving this:

1. Going around in circles with them asking for us to send them our contract prior to the move to verify what we were paying, then saying this was not the correct document as it had a different account number and address to our current one (which was obviously the point given we had moved address) - this happened three times and I could not get them to understand why the previous contract had a different address and account number. They shouldnt even have needed to have asked us about this when it is all on their system
2. Receiving emails from them saying "We’ve tried to contact you to discuss in more detail, but we were unable to reach you. We didn’t want to delay things, so we’ve gone ahead and offered a proposed resolution" when we hadn't been contacted. Our contact details in our account are correct and we had reconfirmed them on emails/letters. The proposed solutions all completely missed the point and were unhelpful. We had one such email at 0930 on Boxing Day morning which just confirms that in reality they hadn't been trying to contact us to discuss and this was just a templated response
3. Having sent the written letter of complaint to their UK based address they then replied by sending a letter to our old address, despite the complaint letter clearly having our current address and new account number on it. This delayed things by over a month
4. When I was finally able to speak to someone directly, they were not a UK based person as I requested (as that was the only way we managed to resolve the last contract mess). The person who I spoke to refused to offer any good will credit for all the time I've wasted in trying to resolve this because "as a sign of good will we are already refunding you the excess costs since October". I made the point that this wasn't goodwill since they shouldn't have overcharged us in the first place but they kept seemingly reading from a script that they were unable to authorise any other credit since they were already making a goodwill payment. wouldn't even refund the £20 moving fee

In my letter I also asked for an explanation as to why they had written to us at our old address and how this has happened after they also botched the other contract issue last year but the person I spoke to wasn't able to comment on any of those and just wanted me to agree to them adjusting the contract length and payment back to what it should have been so they could close the complaint. At this point I'd just run out of patience and energy with Virgin so didn't take these any further. But when our contract does end in October then we'll have no choice but to move to Sky because it's clear that they don't put in place anything to learn from past issues so we would expect to have contract issues again.

The_Boss

So having thought this was all sorted, we upgraded our TiVo box recently to their new version, which Virgin stated would not change anything related to our contract at all, and now have received a contract that gives the expiry date as April 2027. This despite the complaint resolution 6 weeks ago stating they had updated our contract expiry date to October 2026. So it's clear to me that they didn't change the contract at all.

I just don't know what more I can do when their customer service is so shocking. I have given them one last chance to resolve this (by next Wednesday) and will then immediately refer to the ombudsman given how long I have been trying to resolve this.

I'm slightly concerned though that after referring to the ombudsman this may drag on past our October contract expiry date, at which point the cost of the package more than doubles (to around £200!) and that we will be left paying this while the case is looked into. I assume in this case the ombudsman can ask them to refund excessive fees?

The_Boss

I've seen that I can't refer this to the communications ombudsman as it comes under CISAS instead. Do CISAS have the same effective powers as the ombudsman?

I'm now at the point where I don't want to deal with Virgin Media any longer because of their incompetence, as today they sent us a bill for the incorrect higher amount, proving they have not done anything at all to resolve this case, so I want this to be resolved but in doing so cause them as much inconvenience as possible in the same way that they have done this with us.