Virgin Media hit with record Ofcom fine for broadband cancellation complaints

Ofcom has fined Virgin Media £28 million for repeatedly making it difficult for customers to cancel broadband, TV and home phone contracts.

Millions of calls between January 2022 and September 2024 were likely mishandled to delay or prevent customers switching.

Virgin Media has since overhauled its customer service operation, while One Touch Switch has closed off the cancellation route it exploited.

Illustration: Choose.co.uk

Ofcom's largest consumer protection fine

Ofcom has fined Virgin Media £28 million after concluding the provider repeatedly made it unnecessarily difficult for customers to cancel broadband, TV and home phone contracts between January 2022 and September 2024.

The regulator said millions of customer calls were likely mishandled during that period. Its investigation found customers experienced repeated transfers, excessive hold times, dropped calls and continued attempts to persuade them to stay after making it clear they wanted to cancel.

More than one million customers were also forced to repeat their cancellation request because Virgin Media's frontline advisers were unable to process cancellations themselves, requiring them to be transferred to a second-tier agent before they could leave.

Ofcom also found Virgin Media's commission scheme rewarded agents for retaining customers, while its training, quality assurance processes and oversight of third-party call centres all failed to prevent or correct poor practices.

The regulator said some customers resorted to cancelling their direct debits after being unable to cancel their contracts normally, leading to missed payments that damaged their credit records.

The investigation began in 2023 after Ofcom received 1,881 complaints from customers who said they had struggled to cancel their services. It found Virgin Media had breached General Conditions C1.8 and C4, which require providers' cancellation procedures not to act as a disincentive to switching or leaving, and also found the company failed to properly inform some customers of their right to escalate unresolved complaints to an Alternative Dispute Resolution scheme.

Virgin Media admitted the failings and agreed to settle the investigation, reducing the financial penalty by 30%. Ofcom has also directed the company to identify affected customers and provide appropriate compensation or other remedies within six months.

The £28 million penalty is the largest Ofcom has ever imposed under its consumer protection rules, and its third largest fine overall, behind the £50 million penalty issued to Royal Mail in 2018 and the £42 million fine imposed on BT in 2017.

When setting the penalty, Ofcom said it took into account Virgin Media's previous breach of the same consumer protection rule in 2018, its failure to address concerns after the regulator first raised them informally in 2022, and its failure to cooperate fully with information requests during the investigation.

Virgin Media apologised to affected customers and said, "We're committed to giving all our customers great service and apologise to the small proportion who experienced an issue when contacting us to agree a new deal or cancel their service in the past.

"We have completely redesigned our customer services in recent years, addressing the historic shortfalls identified by Ofcom through a number of improvements, and have resolved all formal customer complaints from this period providing redress where appropriate."

What has changed since the investigation?

The cancellation failures covered by Ofcom's investigation relate to the period between 1 January 2022 and 11 September 2024, with both the switching process and Virgin Media's own customer service operation arguably having improved since then.

The most significant change for Virgin Media broadband customers has been the introduction of Ofcom's One Touch Switch process, which came into force on 12 September 2024 - the day after the period covered by the investigation ended.

The system removed the need for customers to contact their existing provider when switching broadband or landline services. Instead, customers only need to contact their new provider, which manages the switch - and cancellation of the old contract - on their behalf via a shared industry system.

Providers are required to comply: those that fail to properly implement OTS, or resort to alternative switching methods when a match between old and new provider fails, risk Ofcom enforcement action, and are required to compensate customers who are left to sort out the switch themselves or who lose service for more than a working day. Ofcom has said non-compliant providers could theoretically face fines of up to 10% of turnover, in line with its standard enforcement powers.

This effectively closes off the specific route Virgin Media used to obstruct customers trying to leave, as switching customers no longer have to navigate their existing provider's cancellation and retention processes.

Natalie Black, Ofcom's Group Director for Infrastructure and Connectivity, said One Touch Switch gives customers "further safeguards to prevent this from happening again".

However, customers who are ending their broadband service without switching to another provider may still need to contact their existing provider directly.

It's also worth considering, with some balance, the improvements Virgin Media has made to its own customer service operation and corporate culture, since the period covered by the investigation.

Reforms introduced during 2025 included a specialist UK-based support team for complex cases, expanded staff training and AI-assisted tools designed to help agents respond faster and more consistently during customer interactions.

There is evidence those changes have improved Virgin Media's customer service performance. Ofcom's Q3 2025 data showed the provider generated seven broadband complaints per 100,000 customers, falling below the industry average for the first time since 2019.

That marked a significant improvement from Q3 2023 during Ofcom's investigation, when Virgin Media generated 32 complaints per 100,000 customers - more than double the industry average and the highest rate among major broadband providers.

Ofcom said: "Virgin Media has made a number of important changes, including to improve its commission scheme, training and quality assurance and monitoring."

The wider lesson for telecoms providers

Despite Virgin Media's subsequent customer service overhaul, with its recent fall in complaints providing some evidence of the potential impact, the case highlights the risks created when commercial incentives and internal processes are designed around business outcomes without sufficient consideration of the resulting consumer experience.

It's possible to see the same pattern play out elsewhere in the telecoms industry.

Mid-contract pricing is one example, where providers have repeatedly sought to protect revenue by making use of the flexibility left within changing regulations. Yet the resulting approaches to annual price rises can create confusion for consumers and make it harder to understand and compare the long-term cost of different contracts.

Security and fraud protection add-ons present another example. Providers can generate additional revenue by selling enhanced protection services, but differences in what is included as standard, what costs extra and what each service actually protects against can leave consumers struggling to understand what protection they have and what they are paying for.

In both cases, as with Virgin Media's cancellation processes, the commercial objective is clear, but the resulting consumer experience risks receiving less consideration.

A better understanding of the consumer experience created by commercial decisions could help companies identify where incentives, targets and internal processes risk creating confusion or harm before they develop into widespread regulatory failures.