Severn Trent Water is a criminal organisation

I’ve been poorly treated in this country when it comes to just living somewhere. I’ve rented a furnished flat that turned out to have no furniture in it. I’ve been rendered homeless by an incompetent letting agent and a negligent landlord. I’ve had my family subjected to carbon monoxide poisoning due to a faulty gas heater, and then told that the only reason we’re still alive was a bloody great hole in the roof. I’ve been left without heating in winter.

But so far, winning the competition for most infuriatingly bureaucratic and resolutely anti-consumer experience in the UK is in the area of water supply.

This is a very long story, which I shall try to summarise and tell as briefly as possible — because apart from being dull and repetitive, it makes me very cross. Thing is, it should make you cross too.

If you’ve ever paid a water bill on an unmetered property, then Severn Trent have been overcharging you. Seriously overcharging you — especially if you live in a flat. They admit that the amount that they charge you is far too much, and they are unprepared to do anything about it. In my case that bill for drinking, flushing and washing: at present — over £650.

For the last God-knows-how-long, I’ve been engaged in an ongoing battle with Severn Trent Water. If you don’t have a water meter, they calculate the cost of your water on the rateable value of the land on which your home is situated. We live in a building in a fairly nice area, with 50-odd other residents. Naturally, to house an 8-storey building like this, the land is going to be fairly sizeable — and it’s that bit of land that our water rates were being valued on.

I pointed out the absurdity of this quite some time ago. Over a year, I think… and I was promised action. Nothing.

Then suddenly, there was a big scandal in the media about Severn Trent’s notorious and criminal overcharging, and the company was forced to reassess all of the accounts, and send out new, corrected bills. It was in the news. I remember watching it on the telly.

But in the meantime, our battle raged on. After a great deal of tedious to-ing and fro-ing I agreed to get a water meter installed, as this was the only way we could show our water usage. That way, the real amount could be calculated, and applied back to when we first moved into the property. This seemed like a sensible solution. We could prove the overcharging, and the situation could be rectified. By now, our bill had reached in excess of £800.

The meter was installed (rather badly, and we have cables pulling up edges of carpets now) and so we thought we’d leave it a month or two to establish the pattern of water consumption.

Then, from nowhere, presumably on the back of the negative publicity and a promised change in the billing at Severn Trent, our account dropped overnight from in excess of £800 to around £200. That’s better. However, we also received a bill for £0.00.

While waiting for the meter-based bill to turn up we received a final demand for the £200 invoice, and another for the £0 invoice. So, even though we had yet to see any evidence of metered water charges, we paid the former, and decided to ring to query the latter. There was no way I was being taken to court for an unpaid bill of zero money.

I spoke to Dwayne, who informed me that I shouldn’t worry about the £0 and that, in fact, I shouldn’t have paid the £200 either, because the account was in the process of being reassessed by ‘the system’. I figured that this must be the back-calculation based on meter readings. I decided to get something in writing.

No, said Dwayne, he couldn’t possibly email me or give me something in writing. But his manager might. I received a call from Marcia the next day, and she assured me that the £0 bill would go away, the £200 payment would be credited to the account, and then anything left over would be refunded to us.

Today, we received a bill for £650.

Not only had we returned to square one, but as part of that bill, we also had documentation of 3 months of metered water usage that proved that our average water consumption was actually around £10 a month. So I called them yet again with two questions:

1) Why has the £400-odd that fell off the bill when it was last reassessed (around the time of that last scandal) suddenly returned?
2) Why has our average metered rating not been applied retrospectively as promised?

I spoke to Geraldine, who was, at first, helpful — then defensive. I then spoke to her manager Sue, who went straight to defensive.

The upshot is this:

They are not prepared to apply metered rates retrospectively to bills, even when those metered rates prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the unmetered charges were off by a factor of about 4 or 5. If they did, then they would have to do that for everyone — and they would also have to admit that their standard unmetered charges, based on the rateable value of the property, are extortionate — particularly when it comes to flats and apartments. The person who told me they would retrospectively calculate the metered amount was lying to me.

Moreover, the person that told me that the rateable value was on the value of the land was wrong. I’m now told that it was set in 1990 on an inspector’s opinion of the rentable value of the flat. Who knows? At any rate, it’s at a much higher value than any of the houses in the area. Flats in tower blocks apparently rent for much more than three bedroom Moseley homes with off-street parking and lush greenery.

Their defense is that the rates on which they calculate the unmetered water bill is set by the Inland Revenue. That’s fine. I appreciate that. What I do not accept is that that means they have no control over the bill amount. Inland Revenue could say the rated figure is £X. From there, Severn Trent will apply a formula — they will multiply or divide that £X by an arbitrary figure to come up with an unmetered charge. The point I have been failing to make to any of the Severn Trent drones is that the formula is entirely within their organisation’s control. They are not powerless over the amount they charge their customers, despite what they try to tell us.

I also do not accept that there is nobody in the organisation who has the authority to look at a bill, see that it has been unarguably proven to be incorrect and then apply changes.

The answer to this is that, yes, there probably is somebody who could do that — but we’re not going to, and nor are you going to be allowed to speak to that person. We offer a choice: either you install a water meter or we will happily charge you vastly in excess of the value of the service. We know that it’s wrong, absurd and criminal — and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Direct quote: “If we amend one unfair bill, then we have to admit that the whole system is in the wrong — and we’d have to amend them all.”

Too bloody right.

You had one angry customer whose problem you could have quietly solved. Now you have on your hands a representative of an entire constituency of customers who have been criminally overcharged, and he works in the media.

You can expect me now to not only try and get my bill sorted — and keep working my way up until I find a human being who can actually step outside the machine, make a rational decision and apply actual influence rather than just submit to a bureaucratic and corrupt policy — but also expose the criminal nature of what your organisation is involved in.