I’ve a feeling in my water this is wrong
Feb 26 2007
YOU’VE heard of Chinese Water Torture? Lecturer Andrew Dubber reckons he’s identified the Birmingham equivalent after finding out that he was spending £300 over the odds for one of the basic necessities of life.
Andrew has just had a water meter installed in his Moseley flat and his bill has plummeted.
His new annual charge is just £131, a whopping decrease on the £431 he used to pay for his unmetered supply.
Although Andrew is delighted at paying less, he’s outraged at the extent to which local water provider Severn Trent were previously “ripping him off”.
“It means that people who live in our building are paying three and half times more for water than they should be,” he says.
And he has a point. The current system for charging customers who don’t have meters is based on the rateable value of the property in 1989 – a truly bizarre method of calculation which bears no relation to the amount consumed.
It means an elderly couple in a flat can end up paying more than a large family who have numerous baths and showers and run the washing machine all day.
Severn Trent insist the pricing structure is nothing to do with them. They are simply following a formula laid down when water supplies were privatised.
True enough. But can you hear them loudly demanding a change to the current system? Me neither. Why should they? Last year, it enabled them to rake in a profit of £488 million.
As Andrew Dubber says: “They were fined for systematically over-charging their business customers last year. But it seems they are doing the same to their residential customers every year.”
Nice work
Any response from OFWAT?
Hardly. Apparently I’m now up to stage 2 of a 4-part complaints procedure. I’m convinced that the British could find a way to bureacratise humming to oneself.
I recently went into a central office of Travel West Midlands because I still had 10 days left on a 4-week bus pass when my annual one finally turned up at work. I asked the woman at the counter if she could refund the difference. She was, after all able to take money from people, so surely it would be the simplest thing in the world to refund on unused passes.
No — that would have to go in a letter to head office.
So I write this letter, with the required 2 photocopies of the bus pass.
A week later, I received a reply from TWM head office. I’m sorry, we don’t refund on anything less than 2 weeks, because it is not worth the cost of all the paperwork and postage to do so. You’ll just have to be £15 out of pocket.
Had they just empowered their retail staff with a simple procedure, it wouldn’t cost them a bean. But then, it wouldn’t let them keep that extra £15 for no reason, would it?
The capacity of British people to just put up with this kind of pointless, insane and anti-consumer crap is just mind-boggling.
Or maybe I’m just unreasonable.
Water bills are to rise by seven per cent in England and Wales next year, the regulator Ofwat has confirmed.
Water bills are to rise by seven per cent: A typical bill will go up £20 to £312
Probably to compensate for the revenue shortfall at the Dubbers in Birmingham…
Cheers
J