3 - Cancelled Phone Contracts

[Low]

Hello there!

Having been in an IVA since 2013, I was today informed by Three that my (well, our, but they're in my name) phone contracts have been cancelled. At first, I thought 'okay' but upon reading the terms and conditions I find this:

Cancellation Fee: means, for Pay Monthly Customers, a fee charged if we end the agreement due to your conduct or if you end your agreement within the Minimum Term. The fee is set out in the Price Guide and is calculated as a lump sum equivalent to the total of the monthly charges remaining during the Minimum Term of your agreement

Which would be disastrous. Two of the contracts are ending this year anyway - I'm glad about that, I'd been intending to downgrade to £10-15 rolling contracts because, frankly, we don't need to upgrade our phones.

However, as a lump sum this is going to be an absolute killer. Frankly, at the greatest stretch I don't see how they can justify charging any more than the market value of the subsidised phones provided as part of the contract, but it certainly seems as though they're going to try.

Do I have any sort of recourse here? They claim to have cancelled the contracts because they were informed that I'm in IVA, which is interesting given that they were not included in the arrangement or shown any sort of interest prior to now. As far as I can tell, my only option is going to be to obfuscate as much as possible and mess around with whichever tone-deaf, cack-handed debt collector they decide to sell the bounty to.

I'm sick of this crap, to be honest. I'm already plagued with depression and have dealt with enough from the creditors who ARE named in the agreement thinking that they can sell my debt again and again and again and again and again and again.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Adam Davies]

Hi and welcome

Nothing to worry about as they will come into your existing IVA
Just inform your IP and send in details of the cancelled contracts

Regards

[Low]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply; that's reassuring. I think one of the contracts ends in Feb/March, so I'll probably settle that one myself and roll the remainder into the IVA.

Do you have any idea how the IP is likely to treat the additional debt so far as repayment goes? For instance, will they look at the debt relative to the rest of the IVA instead of just going "okay, you were paying this in phone contracts, now you can lump the same onto your IVA each month"?

[luluj]

They must have changed policy recently then as we were with Three during our IVA and they were fine ..... Tmobile appear to be friendly with limited checks on basic ohone packages

[plasticdaft]

What a stupid policy to have. Fair enough if you owed them money which was included in an iva but for well managed accounts it seems daft. They are losing customers and wont get as much money back?!?

Paul