News
Water market deregulation having adverse effect on water bills.
Since March of this year Water Consultancy firm H20 Building Services have rejected or returned hundreds of water bills back to the water companies via their client water bill validation and bureau service division due to water market deregulation.
Since water market deregulation in England which allows none residential organisations to switch water supplier H20 is reporting masses of incorrect water bills from water companies and no correct bills have been issued since March for clients sites in Scotland which is a potential breach of water supply contracts.
If it wasn’t for the fact that H20 Building Services clients have water bill validation and bureau contracts in place in order to validate water bills and capture incorrect charging hundreds of water bills would have arrived from the retailers direct to customers and paid as the billing errors will not have been identified.
Incorrect water billing is now becoming a massive issue, the only way for customers to limit the damage of incorrect billing is to sign up to a water bill validation and bureau service contract as some water companies are incapable of issuing correct water bills.
H20 also reports that incorrect water bills have been rejected and sent back for correction many times and still the same bills are returned by the water companies as correct yet they contain more errors.
Senior Partner Graham Mann says “Some water companies are now providing an appalling service, not just incorrect bills and no bills for Scottish sites but the communications in respect of updates are poor, it certainly appears some water companies have more serious internal issues than they are admitting too.
It really is about time water companies are charged by us for every failure on billing, as our customers have not had correct bills for months which will present us with a serious backlog of bills needing validation, this is all since water market deregulation”
In addition to incorrect billing and periods of no bills whatsoever other services have been affected quite seriously.
For example: Before water market deregulation a water flow data logger could be installed to the water companies water meter in order to identify water losses and water leaks as part of a clients water cost reduction / water management strategy, permission has to be granted by the water supplier and this usually took around 2 months.
Now after water market deregulation we have to make an application to the retailer, this is then recorded and sent to the Wholesaler, H20 sent the application in a staggering 5 months ago and still the applications have not been approved, let alone the data logger installed.
The overall effect is now customers are paying more than they need as water management projects are being held up by the water companies inability to deal with approval applications in a timely manner.
The water companies should pay for delays and more robust action is needed to force them to provide the improved services promised as up until now it is getting progressively worse.