Cancellation fee

[#1]

The recharge is only triggered if jumpers have to be recovered. In this case there is no way any jumpers had to be recovered. BTW will not have charged PN.
Retail were wrong, there's no doubt, but PN could have applied discretion rather than insisting on applying a charge which didn't actually exist in the first place.
The lesson for PN is, don't assume

[#2]

Should not the question be Who placed the cease order? As the line would have had a Plusnet Tag BT could not take the line over without using a MAC. Plusnet would not have raised a cease order as the MAC might not have been used.
Edit: Unless this was a migration from ADSL to Fibre.

[#3]

Quote from: Mark

The recharge is only triggered if jumpers have to be recovered. In this case there is no way any jumpers had to be recovered. BTW will not have charged PN. Retail were wrong, there's no doubt, but PN could have applied discretion rather than insisting on applying a charge which didn't actually exist in the first place. The lesson for PN is, don't assume

I have a question which as ex Plusnet staff you should know the answer to
How frequently do BT Openreach generate an invoice and send it to Plusnet
The reason for asking is that I would be very surprised if it is done for each and every occurrence as this would cause havoc in the billing systems
If - and this is purely supposition - the bills are generated monthly Plusnet would have no idea whether a charge has been raised or not until the monthly account comes in. So under your scenario Plusnet could never bill the end user for a cease charge until the actual invoice from BT Openreach arrives and can be checked against the user account

[#4]

Quote from: Mark

...PN could have applied discretion rather than insisting on applying a charge which didn't actually exist in the first place. The lesson for PN is, don't assume

I suggest that the real lesson is that no one should assume - you cannot know for sure that there was no charge to PN.
In any event, the T&Cs charge is not for jumper recovery, it is for cessation of service provision WITHOUT using the supplied MAC code.  Those are the facts which apply here.  Service provided by PN was terminated, without the given MAC code being used (due to the new provider's failure to apply industry agreed process), therefore the T&Cs apply.  The user's recourse is with the faulty party, who have done the right thing and covered the user's perceived out of pocket costs.  As Jim suggests, to wait for BT's jumper recovery charges and then allocate them to each non-MAC terminating user is simply not practical; even if it were, there'd be hundreds of groans on here that PN were charging customers for something many weeks after they were no longer a customer of PN.
No one in the industry is a charity, not BT, not PN.  They all have rules for the provision of service - if you do not read them before signing up and the you don't like the outcome, then I'm sorry for your predicament but tough!  People are always fast to complain when they don't like the consequences of THEIR actions, even if such actions were as the result of someone else's failure and then seek to blame the rule setters.  Here the user is not out of pocket, the third party who caused the 'problem' have recompensed him... so why the gripe with PN?  Some other sour grapes related to their reasons for leaving PN I can only suspect!