Thread: Paid £200 to terminate BT contract for new tenant and then had old number reallocated to them!

When we left our home - which we rented out as we couldn't afford the mortgage anymore - we had to pay BT the best part of £200 because we had been in an 18 month BT total Broadband package.

The following day the new tenants moved in and set up BT Broadband etc etc and were given our old telephone number!

We had actually specifically - we really did - ask them not to reallocate the number and they had said that was fine - the reason being was that we had had 100's of nuisance calls as the number had been used before we had it by a local business.

If we had known they were going to do that we could have come to a deal with the tenants and saved ourselves a load of dough and loads of embarrassing debt collection calls going to the tenants.

Does anyone have any opinion as to what extent they were allowed to do what they did as we were really fuming at the time and it is still causing problems.

Thanks

Hettie2

I thought BT tended to allocate the phone number to the property, not the customer. Though writing that now, it does seem odd.

As far as I can see, they are perfectly within their rights to give the number to the new tenants at the property; put another way, why wouldn't they be allowed to? (Though as I said before, this does seem an odd practice given security concerns nowadays)

You might have asked them and they might have agreed, then you cancelled the contract and they have no liability to you and can, I would imagine, do what they like with the now "spare" number.

Did you put the request in writing? If so perhaps you can follow up, if not, I'd forget about it - BT probably have.

Perfectly OK - and the established practice for years. Yes, you could have saved on the cancellation if they simply used your line, but this places you at an incredible risk as YOU are presonally responsible for the line, whether they paid it or not.

If they complain to BT they keep getting nuisance calls, BT will renumber them for free, but in answer to your question, once a line number is allocated, it is very rare for it to be changed unless there is a specific reason for doing so.