Water rate rises

It's not so much the water itself it's all the charges. When I had a shop I rarely used any water but each month I'd be charged a scandalous amount just for making a few cups of tea.

You were paying £72 a month? £864 a year?

I am a single person household and considered by my water company to be a “water-wise household” using no more than 110 litres a day. I pay £8 a month for metered water to one company and around £160 a year, paid six monthly, to another company for sewage - a total of £256.

Over the next six months the two will be merged into one monthly payment. News reports say bills are set to go up by £156 a year or £3 a week. Proportionately that's a huge increase, akin to loading the standard charges for gas and electricty which disproportionately affect low users but it still means that I will be paying just over a £1 a day for clean water and sewage. That seems very reasonably to me.

Your payments for both now sound remarkably low. Is there some element of refund in there?

That doesn’t answer your question. I don’t doubt that some light users who are not metered are paying too much and some heavy users who are deliberately resisting a meter would end up paying more.

The news reports say that the proposed increase of £156 a year is to pay for investment that is aimed at preventing 140,000 annual sewage overflow spills so that’s on top of costs that would have factored into your earlier bills.

Well someone has to pay for the water executives bonuses, so it looks like it has to be the rest of us.

Allegedly those whose companies are responsible for illegal sewage dispersal will not get their bonus.
We’ve had a meter for quite a few years, our bill is increasing significantly this year, if it’s shown the rise improves their service and processes I don’t mind, but I’d like to see the accountability.

My water/sewerage bill went from £47 pm to £14pm when my water meter was turned on. So realistically taking all the other water meters into account a huge loss to the water companies. So I wouldn't be surprised if that is behind the intended rises.

Re the original bill, it was based on house band, regardless of the fact that we went from 6 to 2 occupants and yes it was £72pm.
Originally, we got a huge refund, because they promised to fit the meter . . . and didn’t for quite a long time, despite frequent emails and phone calls. Then they sent the monthly payments, including a £5 discount for paying by direct debit.
I’m just interested in whether they’re trying to make up the shortfall in payments caused by the uptake of water meters.
1 house with an approximated saving of
£60pm = £720 pa. Imagine that extrapolated to 100 houses. Suddenly a shortfall of £72,000.
Even tanith’s more moderate saving of £396pa would mean a shortfall of £39,600 if a hundred users took up the meter offer.

The uptake of water meters doesn’t necessarily lead to a loss of revenue for the water companies. Whilst one and two person households, particularly if they are in a house with 3+ bedrooms will most likely pay less, larger households will generally pay more with a meter.

The broad rule is if you have more people than bedrooms, metered water is more expensive than water rates.

B sides hat, of course, are charges for businesses.

There is no competitive market in water and sewage industry. It should never have been privatised by the Tories because it became a monopolistic money machine for the new owners. We are all paying the price of that.

The gas standing charge is another rip-off.
My daughter has a gas pipe for one small gas fire.
She uses it a half a dozen times a year.
The standing charge I think is about 50p a day.

Ah! I see what you mean, Mollygo. I have been metered for a very long time - maybe more than 30 years. I'd completedly forgotten that non-metred charges (in England and Wales) are based on rateable value.

Martin Lewis explaining here:

www.moneysavingexpert.com/utilities/cut-water-bills/

I have a neighbour who refuses to switch. Two person household, one out at full-time work. I know she pays a lot more than I do. From what she tells me and what I notice her do, I imagine their use could be more than double mine but as we are band F council tax it does sound like she might still save money on a meter.

Now I see your point. In high-banded areas, if lots of people switched it could leave a sizeable loss in water company receipts.

I read that 60% of households do have water meters. There are around 27 million households in total so that's 16 million metered, leaving 11 million unmetered.

But, around 65% of all housing stock is in Bands A-C. The largest band is A covering 24% of all housing stock. Less than 10% are in the three highest bands F to H. I suspect that the "overpayers" and the "underpayers" would even out.

The long overdue investment, repair, replacement and refurbishment of the water infrastructure should have been ongoing for the last 30 odd years, but instead the fat cat management and shareholders have doled out bonuses and dividends to themselves.
Why have they only just realised that the systems need to be maintained, upgraded and receive investment?
Why is nobody questioning what they did with millions and millions of pounds last year, or ten years ago?
Why are we accepting of their incompetence in running the systems efficiently and issuing obscene amounts of bonuses and dividends instead of maintaining the infrastructure?
We are held to ransom on who supplies our water and have no choice other than the regional authority in our area!
I get so angry at this subject 🤬.

Well said PestyOne.

My bills went down considerably when I got a water meter fitted. I now pay £32 a month for water and sewage. Which is a lot better I think we paid £70 a month prior to that too. I’ve had mine 2 years now.

62dg
Interested to hear that we weren’t the only ones paying £70 a month prior to having a water meter fitted. The only thing that still puzzles me is that when I look at our account, it says read by you but we can’t read the water meter.

Mollygo I read our meter by removing a small round plate in the pavement outside our house.
Our Band G house was £96 a month before we converted to a meter when our boys left home, reduced to £35.

NotAGran55

Mollygo I read our meter by removing a small round plate in the pavement outside our house.
Our Band G house was £96 a month before we converted to a meter when our boys left home, reduced to £35.

I could remove the small round plate outside our house too, except that the meter is more than an arms length down a hole there.
I did at first attempt to read it by dusting the dirt off and using a selfie-stick, but United Utilities assured me that they would be reading it remotely, hence my surprise at the read by you on the bill.

Mollygo that is odd isn’t it that it says that on your bills. They come and read ours every six months and I like to do it during the months in between.

NotAGran55, your meter must be easily accessible, rather than ours as described earlier. No one comes to read the water meters on our road. It would be quite funny to watch them kneeling on the pavement, dusting the meter surface then trying to see what it says.
The bill looks like this.

They’ve milked our water bills for enormous bonuses whilst doing nothing about the sewerage.

Now they’ve got the nerve to charge us for their utter incompetence and lack of care.

It is time our water was nationalised. Such a basic human need should never be subject to profit.

Mollygo our water meter is about 25cm below ground and the reading is visible once I’ve wiped the dust off.

If I was you I would contact your provider to ask them why the bills show incorrect information, but that’s because I’m pedantic about such things 😀