Finally got round to ringing Virgin yesterday, got through to their call centre fine and spoke to a very polite person. Despite pointing out that I was happy with my package and didn't want to reduce it, just get a reduction in price she tried to convince me to take faster broadband for an additional fiver a month. When I wasn't budging on that, she then offered to connect me to their disconnection team before pointing out that their disconnection team was also their customer loyalty team.
She transferred me to an agent on that team, he was a little bit difficult to understand, was talking about a "loyalty bonus" but in effect told me that he couldn't do anything for me until my existing contract expired next month and to call back then. I've diarised to do so.
they are definitely making it more difficult to get anything out of them this year and I think they are banking on customer inertia not to call them back.