BT Want to Borrow £8.97

In a strange twist in my ongoing battles with BT it seems that they have decided they would like to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months.

The situation is that a year ago I changed my package and the new package includes a discount of £2.99 a month if you agree to be bound by a rolling one year contract. To date everything has been fine and they have deducted the discount from each quarterly bill.

In April they wrote to say that the first year was nearly up and that if I didn’t contact them they would assume I wanted to continue for a further year. I was happy to continue so did nothing.

I was slightly surprised therefore when the latest bill showed no discount beyond 21st May when the first year ended. So I contacted them to ask what going on, and this is what I was told in response.

I can confirm that the reason the discount has not been applied to your recent bill is because BT wanted to make sure that you where happy to keep the service, therefore this will all be rectified on your next bill in August 19th 2010 and on this bill you will be able to see the adjustments, which will cover the billing period for the 20th May 2010 also.

So basically they are saying that they’re going to take bill me the full price now then refund me on the next bill - essentially they want to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months so they can earn the interest on it instead of me.

The bit about wanting to make sure I was happy to continue is, of course, complete nonsense. As soon as I allowed it roll over into the second year I was contractually bound to continue with it for that year and I’m sure they would have been very quick to bill me for the rest of the year if I had tried to cancel.

I guess maybe I should consider what interest rate I should apply to my loan to them…