High Court sides with Virgin Media over UK legal dispute with Svella Connect

The High Court has ruled in favour of broadband ISP Virgin Media (inc. nexfibre) after one of its civil engineering partners, Svella Connect, launched a legal challenge (Part 7 Claim) against the company due to a dispute over “contractual terms“, which originally touched on issues of worker safety, rate reductions, and work volumes for full fibre operator nexfibre. But the case may be far from over.

For context. Svella Connect is a telecommunications contractor that works with Virgin Media, Openreach and CityFibre to help expand their respective national fibre optic broadband networks. A good chunk of their work with Virgin Media was acquired when they gobbled up the struggling telecoms division of NMCN Plc at the start of 2022 (here).

Regular readers might recall that ISPreview first wrote about the case back in February 2025 (here), which at the time saw a spokesperson for Svella Connect accuse Virgin Media of making “attempted unilateral rate reductions and a shift to less safe working practices—particularly the move away from MEWPs for overhead work to ladders, which was not part of the original agreement.”

Svella Connect also believed that Virgin Media had “not fulfilled certain obligations under the transfer agreement, particularly in relation to work volumes for nexfibre“. As a result, Svella ended up lodging a claim for financial impacts arising from the alleged breaches. At the time Svella said they were hoping to resolve matters amicably and in a way that would “mitigate the impact of any potential job losses“.

The High Court of Justice has now handed down a decision that largely appears to side with Virgin Media. The judge, Mr Justice Pepperall, found the original framework agreements did not guarantee Svella any particular amount of work and allowed Virgin Media to seek competitive bids from other contractors.

Mr Justice Pepperall said:

“Svella has no real prospect of succeeding in its claims for breaches of the implied duties of good faith of the Framework Agreements pleaded at para. 9 of the Particulars of Claim.

Furthermore, Svella has no real prospect of succeeding in its claims for breaches of the implied duties of good faith of the Exit & Settlement Agreement pleaded at para. 40 of the Particulars of Claim.

I therefore grant summary judgement in favour of Virgin Media on Svella’s claims for breaches of these terms, and it is not necessary to consider the application to strike-out such claims further.

I grant Svella permission to amend its Particulars of Claim in accordance with its second draft save that permission is refused to plead the new particulars of breach at para. 1 of Appendix 2 to the draft statement of case.”

However, the remaining contractual dispute has NOT been decided by his judgement, which means that Svella might still be able to establish that Virgin Media was contractually obliged to grant the committed volume of work and failed to do so. If the contractor can establish this then the the case “will succeed at trial“, said the judge. Credits to News & Star for that.

A Virgin Media spokesperson said:

“We have always strongly refuted Svella’s allegations – including those that were already conceded and withdrawn before the recent hearing – and we welcome the judge’s decision to grant our application and summarily dismiss Svella’s claim that we failed to act in good faith. We will continue to robustly defend this case moving forward.”

A spokesperson for Svella Connect said:

“Svella Connect Limited confirms that its primary multi-million-pound express contract breach claims against Virgin Media Limited are 100 per cent alive, intact and have been ordered by the High Court to proceed directly to a full trial.

The surviving litigation targets Virgin Media’s unilateral execution of a total volume freeze, which Svella Connect contends represented a bare breach of absolute, written commercial commitments.

While a recent interim Technology and Construction Court (TCC) ruling restricted certain arguments regarding unwritten implied terms, Svella Connect’s primary lawsuit remains robustly active.

Svella Connect was contractually established to step into the shoes of NMCN’s contractual responsibilities in October 2021 after NMCN entered administration.

Virgin Media signed a novation for three existing contracts to allow their operations to be unaffected and maintain vital regional network infrastructure deployment on behalf of Virgin Media.

This meant Svella Connect had to execute the transfer of 688 employees and 670 vehicles, plant, equipment, proprietary telecommunications IT infrastructure and properties in the North West, Yorkshire and East Midlands to service the contracts.

The company will fiercely pursue Virgin Media at the upcoming full trial to recover the full measure of its multi-million-pound liabilities forced upon the business by Virgin Media, with sums in excess of £30million.”

Disputes between network operators and contractors do happen quite frequently in this industry, although many often get resolved before reaching the courts and thus simply go unnoticed by the wider public. In this case the dispute between Virgin Media and Svella Connect went further and spilled over into the public domain, although it appears as if we haven’t yet reached the last act.