BT Business Cloud Work nightmare forcing 15 licences and £30k ultimatum, how do we resolve this?
Posted by yoldevam@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 17 comments
On behalf of a friend. We’re a small family-run B&B in London, BT customer since 2009. BT migrated us to Cloud Work / Cloud Voice a few weeks ago and since 9 Dec 2025 our account has been suspended 7 times, with periods of no working phone service (including about a week completely down). For a hotel, that’s disastrous.
Now BT is pressuring us with this insane choice:
Sign a NEW 5-year contract (\~£30,000)
OR
Pay a “cancellation fee” (\~£30,000) for the previous contract — even though BT already disconnected/ceased the lines and says the account is closed.
On top of that, they refuse to give us the setup we asked for:
We requested:
• 1 main reception phone
• Room lines mainly for internal calls (limited extensions)
BT insists we must have 15 licences + 22 limited extensions, claiming it’s “company policy” that Cloud Work has a minimum 15 users. We asked to drop to 1 licence — flat refusal.
They also blamed suspensions on non-payment, but:
• we never received an invoice
• we pay quarterly
• first bill shouldn’t even be due until end of Feb
Most of the selling was done over the phone, so written evidence is limited (which feels intentional).
We’ve raised a formal complaint and are getting nowhere.
Has anyone dealt with this?
• Is this “minimum 15 users” real or just sales pressure?
• They also said if they reduce the licence to 10, we will have to £13.5K in equipment costs.
• If BT already ceased the lines, how can they demand huge cancellation fees AND force a new 5-year deal?
• Best escalation route for a small business — executive complaints, deadlock letter/ADR, solicitor letter?
• Any way to force BT to release call recordings/internal notes?
It genuinely feels like a giant corporation bullying a small family business into a massive contract we never wanted.
Any advice appreciated. 🙏🏽
iamjackscoldsweater@reddit
Out of interest did you get anywhere with this? I'm in a similar situation, unable to approach ombudsman. I also dealt with Local Business (severnside). We took out a new contract in august 2025 and they are still reviewing the billing issues whilst overcharging every quarter. We were given additional lines which weren't agreed to by the sales rep. Complaints are useless. Being routed to the call centre in India provides too much of a language barrier as we aren't getting anything resolved.
Wibbly_Will@reddit
Are you in communication with BT local business or BT themselves?
BT Local business is a franchise system so not always the best. Try to contact and escalate to BT themselves and you might get somewhere.
fenaith@reddit
If you have complained officially. And followed the procedure. You can now go to the ombudsman.
bluetba@reddit
Not as a business you can't, unless you're very small less than 10 employees from memory.
geeered@reddit
r/LegalAdviceUK
BT deals were pretty terrible when I was speccing a phone system. We went with our PBX, using free software and a cheap PC. Pay a bit under £1k a year for 10x external lines, as many internal lines as we want and unlimited UK phones, of which we do use quite a lot.
"Not a Lawyer", but I'd request copies of call recordings under data protection if need be - if they say they don't have them, then it'll cause problems for them later down the line if they suddenly magically appear when it suits them. And if they don't have them, it'll be harder for them to justify anything if there's no signed contract.
No_Preference9093@reddit
This is the solution. Set up PBX for your hotel and simply have one external line. You don’t need external lines from rooms these days, it’s 2026 and everyone has a mobile.
geeered@reddit
There's plenty of other people that will also provide a hosted service - a quick check shows from about £30 a year for hosting with a SIP system based on an Asterisk fork.
Oh... I wonder if there's some generic rebrandable hotel app customers can install on their phones, along with a 'portal' site they can access on a browser? Not been anywhere that I've seen this, but I'm sure I'm far from the first person to have thought of the idea!
phatboi23@reddit
there 100% is.
source: i did some time fixing PBX stuff in hotels and businesses, mainly on the networking/router side.
zombieroadrunner@reddit
It's also worth checking if you dealt with BT direct or BT Local Business - the latter isn't actually BT, but independent resellers trading under BT's umbrella and traditionally are massively shady cowboys.
yoldevam@reddit (OP)
BT Local Business 😱
KingDaveRa@reddit
'Massively shady cowboys' is an understatement. They're only interested in new business, zero interest in existing customers. Totally crappy business model.
jimicus@reddit
That's a tough one.
You can head over to r/LegalAdviceUK - but in short, business-to-business contracts have a lot less protection than business-to-consumer.
If it were me, I would be inclined to contact someone else for a suitable alternative (and I might not even bother with internal extensions to the rooms) and tell BT to go whistle. They're pressuring you to pay £30k for a product they have demonstrated isn't fit for purpose; are they seriously going to try and tell a judge that just because it's a business contract they can demand this?
But it's easy for me to be Billy Big Bollocks on the Internet when it isn't my livelihood at stake, and the money BT are asking means it would be well outside small claims territory (which means you need to get real lawyers involved, which means it rapidly becomes very expensive).
Vic_Serotonin@reddit
You may get some good advice on r/lLegalAdviceUk also.
setokaiba22@reddit
What does your contract actually say - the latest one you’ve signed that’s what you need to know inside and out
If selling was done over the phone you still get a letter/email confirmation of the agreements and what you are signing up for. If you’ve asked for these things but signed for something else..
You’ve been a customer since 2009 so how were you paying these then? Not direct debit just invoice?
You should be able to see these in your online account?
Your formal complaint what do you mean nowhere. Have they given you a deadlock letter yet or just not responding?
You could try escalating with the CEO team sometimes it works allison.kirkby@bt.com
Can’t comment on the ‘policy’ but it might well be you’ve signed up to something that has a min of 15 licenses perhaps
True-Abalone-3380@reddit
I can't help with the legal side, but BT billing and BT Cloud Voice are not fit for purpose. Since we've moved to BT Net and CloudVoice about a year ago we've had more downtime and more billing errors than the past 20 years combined.
I suspect one gotcha is each handset is a proper independent external "line" (but runs over an independent Internet connection) and charged as such. Back with the PABX systems you could basically buy a handset, plug it in, and that was that. Ideal for all of your internal extensions.
With CloudVoice there is no concept of an internal call, every handset has a public number and what you'd think should be an internal call is actually via their cloud.
notouttolunch@reddit
Ombudsman.
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