Opinion

[#1]

Well that was October, this is December.
The engineer came and went (I wasn't present) all resident's sockets remain as they were (apparently no bell wire on 'master'(?) LJU). Customer now been charged full engineer call out charge via DD. After customer wrang BT this is being changed to a refund of full charge lump sum deduction and charged instead through monthly deductions with bill.
The current system in the UK is rubbish!
And I don't care how many 'know-it-alls' queue up to tell me how wrong I am.

[#2]

Does their phone now work?

[#3]

Yes. Their phone has worked for some time. As they are very immobile a friend had supplied them with an extension cord to allow use of their phone without moving from their chair. I later found this to be faulty and it was replaced.
However, when I was at the flat with my corded phone for testing, I found I could ring out but my phone did not ring (this was what they originally complained about - their phone not ringing and later unable to make calls) so I reported THAT as the fault. First to the flat maintenance company who said "Need to complain to BT in first instance" and so to BT via my phone plugged directly into their LJU in the living room. I warned them of a possible charge if no fault found, and arranged with BT to take any charge via monthly billing rather than lump sum. Customer agreed to go ahead on that basis.
Unfortunately I wasn't present when engineer called, I had wanted to be. From what was reported to me at the time (insofar as I can remember) I expected no charge. Now, two months later, they are being charged. The customer cannot now remember what engineer said. The LJU master (?) socket was not replaced by NTE5 socket. So what fault was found? What work was done? Why no ring wire circuit (which my phone needs) on the LJU? As no NTE5 socket was installed there is no reason why a future fault will not lead to all the same rigmarole and another "engineer call out fee".
Point is - it is the old, the vulnerable and the disadvantaged who pay these fees and are thereby subsidising the rest of us. Some on here need to contemplate that.
If it was my phone they wouldn't get away with this so easily!

[#4]

I would say that your friend needs to get back to BT and complain that they are being charged at all. Since NO fault was found internally and the Engineer did nothing to resolve the fact that phones don't ring (when plugged into the master socket?) there is no justification for the charge. If there was/is a fault internally the engineer should have fixed it which he didn't. And presumably a phone won't ring when plugged directly into the master? You need to really press BT more, they can be persistent.

[#5]

The engineer's notes quite possibly no longer exist by now. When I complained when something similar to this happened to us, I got the impression that the only details BT had to go on, by the time the charge appeared on the bill, were what I'd written in the complaint letter.

[#6]

It was me who originally phoned through the fault to BT - my test phone not ringing on line - but though the customers phone (which BTW has also been replaced by a new purchased unit) works, I have no idea whether my phone would work there now. My phone needs an external ringing capacitor which obviously was at the time not present, not connected or faulty. The original phone must have had its own ringing capacitor and so this went unnoticed.
The only thing I can think of is to try my phone on the cct again - if it still doesn't ring then the reported fault would definitely not have been cleared. I don't even know which of the two LJU sockets is the master, and the one in the bedroom wasn't even working. It's all rather a mess.

[#7]

ejs, did you ever get any further with BT, or get a refund?

[#8]

Yes, I think it got refunded eventually. At the time we had three LJU sockets, with the T in a circle logo, one of them was the master with the bell capacitor and other components in, the other two were extension sockets, the sockets look the same on the outside. There is a plastic BT66 box on an outside wall where the cable to each LJU socket is connected to the incoming line, this arrangement is known as star wiring. In September 2013, we had a fault with the phone not working, I think the broadband was still working same as usual somehow. That time, BT replaced the old Post Office Telecommunications BT66 with a pretty much identical new BT66, the new one labelled with BT of course, and re-connected all the wiring in it, in the same star arrangement. That wasn't the one they tried to charge us for though. At the end of October 2013, the phone and broadband died completely. This was after a night of strong winds, the BT helpline apparently giving the impression you had to pay for any storm damage, and the BT website saying you had to pay if the fault was outside your house but within the boundary of your property - unfortunate if most of your wiring is on outside walls. Due to the storm, we had to wait a week for an engineer to arrive. This time the engineer fixed it by cutting off the wires to one of the extensions sockets (which no longer had anything plugged in) in the BT66 plastic box on the outside wall. We probably got charged on the basis of the fault being with "my" extension wiring, the difficultly being that it wasn't possible to disconnect it myself, or at least I wouldn't be allowed to. Then it became a bit of a farce as apparently we were told the engineer didn't leave any notes (perhaps more likely was that the notes no longer existed a couple of months later by the time the charge appears on your next quarterly bill), and the £129.99 charge was for new equipment, which there certainly wasn't any of.