Virgin Media UK Contractors in Wrexham Accused of Harassment

Cable broadband ISP Virgin Media has apologised after the councillor for Queensway in Wrexham (North Wales), Carrie Harper, accused their contractors of harassing six woman in Caia Park by using “sexually inappropriate behaviour” and swearing.

Back in 2016 the operator announced that their network would be extended to cover an additional 24,000 premises in Wrexham (here). At the time it was suggested that this could also make it the first town in North Wales to receive such large FTTP coverage, although interestingly the work was originally supposed to complete by the end of 2017.

All this formed part of their £3bn Project Lightning scheme, which aims to extend their Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) and pure Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based EuroDOCSIS network to reach an additional 3-4 million premises by around 2019/20 (this could improve their largely urban coverage to reach around 60% of the UK).

However the BBC reports that not all of their contractors have been behaving correctly. Carrie Harper is understood to have received complaints from six women, which she said ranged from “abusive and threatening language and also include several cases of alleged sexual harassment.”

A VirginMedia Spokesperson said:

“We are aware of complaints regarding the conduct of some contractors working on our behalf in Caia Park and we are looking into them. We sincerely apologise to residents for any upset caused and we are working with our contract partner to address the matter.”

Deploying new infrastructure is an expensive business and sadly there are occasions where the disruption can be quite significant, which often rubs local people up the wrong way (sometimes with good reason) and they then have a tendency to direct that frustration toward the contractors. Sadly this can sometimes result in confrontations, particularly if the contractors aren’t well enough trained to deal with those situations.

In this case though there appears to be a different dynamic to some of the complaints and one of the incidents occurred while a woman was walking her son to school. Hopefully Virgin Media are able to get to the bottom of this and can encourage their contractor to take the appropriate action.