To refuse to pay our water bill?!

[Mooblies]

We're just moved from a 3 bedroom house to a smaller 2 bedroom house.

Our water bill at our previous property was £30 per month. We have just spoken to the water company and apparently we will now be paying £800 per month as the new property is on a meter and cannot be taken off a meter.

We are already paying an extra £170 per month rent (it's gone up so much over the last 5 years!) and are really upset at having to find and extra £500 or so a year for water

Mine is £60 a month for a 2 bed flat but everyone has to pay 2 companies for water where I live. One bill for tap water and one bill for sewer

@moleskin that's not the average, it's below. We are a 5 person household in a 4 bed house and if we went on to a meter apparently on 'average use' it would be slightly more than we pay now (£170 per month over 10 months). But I think our use is possibly more than average since our pressure is so bobbins we can't have showers, we have to have baths. :(

@noisy not the southwest then, surely, since down here it's SWW all the way. :(

No, they can't disconnect or mess about with the supply. Thats why they are quick to act on non payers.

Pinot, in Court (with my own ears, not heard of from someone else!) I heard the magistrate say to the non payer that if she did not pay her water supplier she could face a custodial sentence. They took it seriously, and as it was deemed that she could pay but was bad with money (as opposed to having no means at all) then she had to make good the debt pretty quickly too. No £1 per week offerings it was based on the form she filled in for the court and every non essential penny went on repaying the debt. This was Yorkshire Water, if that makes a difference (?) and being heard in Dewsbury Court.

I hope to goodness they don't meter everyone any time soon Its the one area in my life where I feel I get a good deal

MissKeith, YY a custodial sentence is very rare indeed - one hasn't been issued by our Water Company in the 19 years DH has worked there. Theoretically, of course, it could be - I was talking about more practical eventualities :) A CCJ is bad enough though!

Pay for what you use, and take the steps I outlined above, OP

Don't not pay, no matter how much a company pisses you off not paying is never the answer.

Compulsory meters, AFAIK, are for all areas assessed as having water shortage problems. So all the South, for e.g. and Thames area. Not sure about further up north, but if your area has had any shortages...

Ok Pinot fair point! I think they were trying to put the bejaysus up the person I was hand holding to be fair!

YY to CCJ being bad enough, this friend acquaintance of mine has three from YW alone, silly mare. She hates her house too but can't move due to seriously bad history. Or would find it difficult at best.

Ahh must have gone up since I worked there then ;) we have lots of water saving devices in toilets and things but at the end of the day when you have a dd who is rather obsessed with hand washing and toilet flushing no amount of devices will protect your bill!!! Personally I think it should be one water bill the same all over England!

No water shortage in the South West.

Water companies dont take you to court, they sell the debt to a debt collector, they never take you to court or they end up with 50p a week.

Generally speaking no creditor takes you to court as they end up getting next to nothing a week as it were.

Oh I don't know Fanjo... I had a trip to court myself last year with E-On (hence the hand holding for water problems friend, I became an expert ) anyway, they took me to court for owing just over £200 electricity, which I refused to pay, given that my Gas account with same bunch of idiots was almost £300 in credit I decided to take my chances. I had soent months trying to sort it out with them first mind, I had paperwork galore to present to the court

The look on the face of the E-On rep firstly was priceless, and then they had to pay my costs of about a tenner, sort my acount out and sent me £45 cheque for the inconvenience

Shower of idiots! I probably would have just paid, but someone on here sent me to MSE site for advice and they helped me do the rest!

Pinot, phew, glad to here that re metres. We've never even had restrictions in the years I've lived here, so hopefully it won't happen any time soon.

p.s I have to ask if its severn trent your dh works for? They were excellent in the choir series

I pay £90 a quarter and don't skimp on water usage at all - also have a biggish garden that we water a lot. 3 bed house and 3 people.

Do you mean monthly or quarterly OP?

How many children do you have? If you have 3 children and get child tax credits (or maybe its working tax credits) you can have your water bill capped. Google vulverable users for info.

We have 7 in a 4 bed house, we are metered by two water companies and pay 25 quid a month total. Everyone is metered in my town (Kent).So much cheaper then before we were metered, used to cost 50 quid a month before meter!

Teabag yes they will take you to court! I've handled many a counts that have court summons on them.

Ring your water company and ask what helps available

I had a meter in my last house, the bills were £25 a quarter! (There's just ds and I though). This house has no meter, the bills are £27 a month It really does depend on how much you use. If you're cleaning your car every week with the hose, running the washing machine three times a day, taking long baths every evening it's going to mount up.

i had massive problems with united utilities after one reading they said i owed£ 4000 i always paid direct debit so obviously i queried it it went downto£2000 this went on for about two years as i refused to pay more than £30/mnth direct debit untill they could tell me how and why i owed this much they never could just insisted that i did every six months or so when they came to read my meter i would get a bill through sayting they were changing my direct debit to£300/month and i would get on the phone yet again and nobody would resolve it eventually i contacted the consumer coumcil for water who investigated it and discovered somebody at somepoint put a decimel point in the wrong place generating ridiculous bills and they owed me money!Ialso got compensation so my advice would be contacting consumer council for water asking them to investigate rather than just not paying.

£80 per month is an awful lot of water to use if on a meter. You can halve that just by using water reasonably.

Turn taps off when brush teeth, dont wash under running water, turn shower off whilst washing hair and soaping yourself only turning it on again to rinse. Use a bowl for washing up rather than under a running tap, only do full loads of washing, use water butts in the garden and bin the garden hose and put water savers on your taps and in the loo for a start.

Everyone should be on a meter, paying for what you use makes people think alot more about where they waste water.

I have always found water metres to be an excellent idea. When we moved into a house that had one I was terrified as I had heard lots of bad stories about them but I soon found that we used less water than we had to pay for before (in 1998 our water bill was just over £300 a year unmetered) when we moved we had to pay what the water company calculated we would use and this was quite high so the following year our repayments went down to £16 a month! This was with a toddler and a baby in the house. When we moved into our curent house I had a meter installed free of charge and we pay £30 a month (there are 5 of us) and our last 6 monthly bill showed us in credit by £26 - this was after draining our central heating system twice to put chemicals through to clean it out - so much water wasted! I always recommend people get a water meter. Your monthly payments will be recalculated after the first year and I'm sure that as others have suggested, you can get them to recalculate sooner.

We live in the South West by the way

@mooblies then I wouldn't complain because you are being asked to pay well below the average. Unless you don't live in the south west but somewhere like Bristol, which has much much cheaper water and is neither south nor west! This is actually a real issue because the government kept trying to pretend that water prices weren't excessive in 'the south west' by including all sorts of non south west places using diffeent water companies into the average and reducing it significantly. In the end they gave up and admitted that prices in Cornwall and Devon are obscene. But they have only given us all £50 off which isn't exactly the lost treasure of the incas. :(

They have average use age stats. They can predict/model. It's one of the factors they use to set their prices.

Does anyone think nationalising the water companies would be a good idea? Can't see it happening under this government though!