[Kushan]

The problem is that first line agents don't actually get told why utilisation tickets get delayed. In the ticket, it'll just have a fix date of some time in the future. If you're lucky, you might even see a tech note mentioning why it'll be this date but 9 times out of 10 the ticket is completely empty. There's nothing to indicate if it's a BS date or if something is actually being done and no way of chasing it further for an update. You've got a ticket with a date on it and that's it.

So what agents are supposed to say is that the ticket is scheduled to be fixed on that date, but we can only speculate as to why it's taking so long - it can be things like planning permission but not necessarily. Unfortunately a lot of agents don't make it clear that they're speculating and just blame it on the councils, when the reality is that Virgin only clears so much capacity at a time and will push some areas to the bottom of the list.

I was caught out on more than one occasion where the fix date on the ticket was in the past - what on earth can you say, then?

Ultimately, as always with Virgin, they will try to minimise costs and maximise profits - if an area is oversubscribed but not many people are complaining or leaving, they will happily let that stay at the bottom of the list. The only way to force them to fix it is to demand money back each month and encourage anyone else to do the same. At some point it'll just be more economical for Virgin to fix the issue and they'll suddenly find the budget for it.

They were doing better over the last couple of years, but it seems since the LibGlob takeover, they're slipping again.