If your switch went wrong

Switches fail in three shapes, and Ofcom has put a price on each of them.

The first is the delayed start. The new provider promised your service would go live on a set date and it didn't. That pays £6.46 for every calendar day of delay, including the missed start date itself. The new provider owes you this, not the old one, because under One Touch Switch the new provider runs the whole move.

The second is total loss of service. The old line goes dead, the new one never wakes up and you are left with nothing. Report the fault to your provider straight away. If it isn't fully fixed two full working days after your report, you're owed £10.34 for each calendar day until it is, starting with an initial payment once that threshold passes.

The third is the missed appointment. The engineer doesn't show, or the appointment gets cancelled with less than 24 hours' notice, which usually happens while you are already sitting at home having booked the day off. That one pays £32.31 per missed appointment.

A brief wobble during the handover itself is normal and nothing to claim over. Anything under a working day is within the rules; what to expect hour by hour is covered in what happens on switch day.

The scheme is genuinely automatic. Credit where due: this is the industry doing something properly for once. Missed appointments and delayed starts need nothing from you at all. A total loss of service just needs that initial fault report, which is why reporting it immediately matters so much. The clock starts at the report, not at the moment the connection died.

Payment comes as a credit on your bill unless you agree otherwise, no later than 30 calendar days after the appointment was missed or the problem was fixed. You should not have to ask. You should certainly not have to know the rates exist, although knowing them is precisely what gets them paid.

The catch is that the scheme is voluntary. The big names are in it, covering the overwhelming majority of UK homes, but plenty of smaller providers never signed up, and with those you're negotiating on goodwill. Before you start counting the money, check whether your provider belongs to Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme, where the member list, the exclusions and the way the rates rise each April all live.

First, make sure it is actually your switch that failed and not the whole street. Check for a wider outage before you spend forty minutes in a phone queue blaming the wrong thing.

If it is your switch, report it to the new provider the same day. Phone or live chat, it doesn't matter, but get a reference number and write down the date, the time and the name of whoever you spoke to. The compensation for lost service is calculated from your report, so every day you politely wait for things to sort themselves out is a day nobody pays for.

Then keep everything. The order confirmation showing your promised start date. The text about the engineer who never came. The old provider's final bill. None of it feels important on the day, and all of it becomes important the moment someone in a call centre says there's no record of a problem.

If 30 days pass and no credit appears, complain. Use the words "formal complaint", because that phrase starts a clock the provider cannot ignore. Something like this does the job:

"I am making a formal complaint. My switch was due to complete on [date]. The service did not start until [date] / has still not started / the engineer appointment on [date] was missed. Under Ofcom's automatic compensation scheme I am owed £6.46 per day for the delayed start / £10.34 per day for the loss of service / £32.31 for the missed appointment. Please confirm the amount due, credit my account within 30 days and provide a complaint reference number."

Fill in your own dates, delete the bits that don't apply and send it in writing. Email is fine. A complaint made in writing with a named scheme and exact figures gets treated differently from a phone call that begins "I'm not happy", because the person reading it can see you know what you're owed.

Providers resolve most of these at the first ask, frankly because the sums are small and the rules are clear. But if yours digs in, you don't have to keep circling the same complaints team forever.

Once six weeks have passed since your formal complaint, or sooner if the provider sends you a deadlock letter, you can take the dispute to an ombudsman. The six-week threshold applies to complaints raised on or after 8 April 2026; it used to be eight. The process is free, it is independent, and the decision binds the provider if you accept it, while leaving you free to walk away if you don't. For a documented failed switch with dates and reference numbers attached, it is about as close to a sure thing as consumer disputes get.

None of this should put you off switching, by the way. The process works smoothly for most people, and moving to a better deal remains the single most reliable way to cut your bill. It's also worth checking the final bill from your old provider after any switch, smooth or otherwise, because billing past the switch date is its own small genre of mistake. The rest of our switching guides cover the journey end to end.