My mother lives in a house that has been converted into two flats. Both flats have separate phone lines in, my mother has had her line since about 1982.
Previously we have not had any problems but about 10-years-ago the ground floor flat was sold and the new owner started to rent it out. The first tenants swapped from BT to Sky as their phone provider and since then every time there has been a change of tenancy the new tenants apply to takeover my mother's phone line.
Whenever we receive notification from BT of the request to transfer the line we contact them immediately to tell them it is an error, but on one occasion the incoming tenant overrode our cancellation and BT went ahead and transferred my mother's line and phone number to the downstairs flat - leaving her without a phone line for ten days. Dispite it being BT's error, this also meant that my mother was given a new customer account number and was charged a connection fee, although this was eventually waivered.
I have spoken with BT's customer services a few times and have followed their advice to tell the owner to inform the letting agent and new tenants that the phone line cannot be automatically transfered and requires them to book a BT engineer; but there must be a way to solve this problem - one of the engineers that came previously intimated that he knew what and where the problem was but would not elaborate further.
My mother is eighty-seven and constantly worries that her phone will be cut-off again.
Can anyone offer any advice on this?
