Shropshire Councillor Heather Kidd has again slammed the service provided by BT Openreach after the litany of poor service and delayed repairs stretched into a seventh week.
Heather said “This standard of service is truly dreadful. Some in the Hampton Beach area have only been reconnected in the last few days despite the sustained effort of residents and myself over the last few weeks. The surgery in Worthen and some properties in the village have also been affected.
“We have had a variety of excuses as to why the work hasn’t been done and its pretty clear that rural areas get a very poor priority as far as Openreach are concerned.
“After a great deal of hassle from residents and myself most have now been fixed but these problems have been going on since December and its not right that we have had to go through all this just to get phone lines fixed.
“That said I would actually like to thank Kelly McFarlane on the Chief Execs office at Openreach for getting the engineers out the day she picked up my email. She was very effective indeed.
“The service from BT Openreach in this area is very poor if using the complaints system. I have a huge list of actual complaints and responses -many on text responses from BT – and I have sent many of them have to both the Chief Exec of BT and Openreach for investigation. Many were disingenuous, inaccurate and blaming anyone other than Openreach.
“As Ofcom expect 70% of faults to be dealt with in 1-2 days and in 2016 80% of them, I can only think that Openreach thinks that small number of remote people will be averaged out by the quick fix in urban areas.
“If there are any more residents that are still unconnected please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.”