WATER PRICE HIKE BACKLASH
March 20, 2007 3:25 PM
Nick Harvey is witnessing an angry backlash in North Devon over the recent water price hike. In February South West Water announced its price rises for 2007/08 and yet again the South West was hit by a major increase in charges thanks to under investment by previous Governments. While the region has some of the lowest salaries it has to endure some of the highest water prices.
'Although SWW claimed prices would go up on average by 12.5% for metered and 16.1% for unmetered customers this seems to be far from the case,' says Nick Harvey. 'A lot of households are seeing rises of almost 20% and some constituents have seen their charges swell by almost 50% over the last two years and this is completely unacceptable.'
Notably SWW does not deserve all the blame for this situation, OFWAT the regulator for the water and sewerage industry is ultimately responsible for approving these charges.
'We protect your interests, claims OFWAT, I think a lot of people are currently vehemently disagreeing with that,' says Nick Harvey. 'OFWAT's briefing figures remain largely indecipherable and do not seem to match those quoted by SWW.'
OFWAT claims SWW needs to invest more in its water service than its sewerage service and yet in explaining why bills are increasing the emphasis clearly remains on sewerage.
'I don't see why we should be penalised for the £2 billion sewerage clean up bill after almost two decades,' says Nick Harvey. The hardest hit are our pensioners who are now forced to dig deep. One pensioner has informed me that his water bill alone accounts for 9% of his pension. I am now in the process of raising this matter with Christopher Loughlin SWW Chief Executive and OFWAT.'
SWW argue that tariffs are the way ahead.
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