28 February - Thames Water; what a shower!
Everyone is telling me about the horrendous bills Thames
Water have been sending out, 40% increases according to Thames Water’s own website.
My bill has not yet arrived.
I am one of a minority who does not have
a water meter and I have two close
friends in the same situation. All single people with a three bedroom house or a
two bedroom flat. For reasons that don’t make any sense at all, singletons
living alone without a water meter are assessed according to the number of
bedrooms they have. Few things could be more illogical but that is what Thames Water does.
The brains of a tadpole.
The flat dweller paid less than I did last year and the house dweller more
than twice as much. Their questions led me to search TW’s website which led me
to believe that I have been paying too much. The flat dweller has no meter
because it is a Greenwich Council house and the shared services do not lend themselves easily to a metered supply.
I have no meter because the incoming pipework outside was fitted in a non-standard way
by the house builder and Thames Water correctly decided that they couldn’t fit
one internally because it would take over the space occupied by the washing
machine and there is nowhere else to put it. I thought that was reasonable at
the time and agreed to pay the average of single occupiers. (The Assessed Rate.)
The other friend has much the same situation. There is no provision for a meter
under the pavement outside as is the norm and the only space available inside
would involve diverting pipes and destroying
her food cupboard which she obviously could not agree to.
However instead of putting the lady on the Assessed tariff like TW did for me
they kept her on the old Ratable Value Tariff. Hence her paying twice as much as
I am. When she queried it all with Thames Water earlier this month she was told that the only way
out of this situation - apart from losing her pantry - is to pay Thames Water
for the cost of restoring their broken infrastructure and fitting a pavement
meter like they should have provided in the first place. Several hundreds of pounds,
Fortunately the lady is a fighter so she has cancelled her Direct Debit and told
Thames Water that she will only pay the Assessed Rate as I do until they fix
their problem. It is most definitely their problem but they expect their customer to pay for it.
There have been several Thames Water stories on Bonkers over the years including
Bexley Council labelling them
the most “difficult” utility that they have to
deal with. If I can find time to search for the links, I will do so. (Done.
There is another story I could dig out but it is a bit long in the tooth now.)