Virgin Media fails again: Lambton Road

Oh dear, Virgin Media has done it again. Regular readers may recall the months long saga to get Virgin Media to remove one of their defunct utility cabinets from Hornsey Lane. This time, it is a damaged cabinet of theirs on Lambton Road, which is about to hit its three month anniversary since I first reported it.

Islington Council tell me they have been doing their best “We have serve[d] the notification on 3 previous occasions”, but despite the three formal, legal notifications Virgin Media has so far failed to repair the cabinet. The only return so far for all this effort is that they someone has badly and sloppily half stuck some masking tape on the unit.

As I wrote to Virgin about Virgin Media’s Hornsey Lane failure:

There is the small matter of the legal onus on Virgin to resolve this.

There’s also the questionable commercial judgement involved in failing to fix it. I get an awful lot of direct mail from your various firms. But you know what I think each time I receive one of those? I get reminded about the broken box and how you and your colleagues aren’t organised enough to have managed to sort it out yet. Who knows, the copy in the direct mail may be wonderful. The people you pay to produce, design, target and send it may be fantastic. But all their work does is remind me of this failure.

It may be unfashionable to say, but there’s also a question of morality. That pavement isn’t your private property to use as you wish. It’s public property – paid for by taxes – that we, the public, have consented to let you use so you can earn money out of selling us a service. When you use something that isn’t your own, I think you should take proper care of it. It’s great that the law says you should too. It makes sense for your own commercial self-interest too. But even if it was none of that, it would still be the right thing to do.

It is not only in Hornsey Lane and now Lambton Road where Virgin Media has turned out to be so poor at sorting out its utility cabinets. So too on Stroud Green Road and Great Portland Street. Underwhelming, to say the least.