Do you want to be able to choose your water company?

Trix3y

If the process is the same as the so called competition in the energy market and the regulators are the usual weak gutless organizations then no point. I live in one of the most expensive areas for water served by Anglian Water. Having been persuaded to get a water meter I then saw the charges rise rapidly so the low bills I had been quoted just kept rising. Furthermore I had a long running battle with them for eighteen months (which I won) as my bills were so high. They eventually changed the meter. One of the staff confided to me that the meters were not very accurate and his job was to change them when customers complained. Hardly an efficient service. The problem is in this country we are ripped off for all basic services with no one standing up for the consumer.

Smodlet

It's all already been said, not only by me: It's going to happen whether we like it or not and this thread is just an incredibly cheap/free way to start the spew of "management speak" BS to pave the way. It will raise everyone's prices and it will just be tough doo-doo. Ofwat make Ofgem look like a rottweiler and they are absolutely toothless.

Trix3y, thank you. We had the exact same experience with Anglian Water, queried the meter, were told there was nothing wrong with it but "we'll replace it anyway, just to be sure." Why, if there was "nothing wrong with it"? We, unfortunately gave up before eighteen months and paid through the hose, I mean, nose for the next eleven years... at least you could drink the stuff, though. ST's tastes as if it has been used to clean floors with.

Gadgetmaster

Some well reasoned and voiced thoughts in this discussion. I, for one, have regularly taken advantage of competition in the energy, telephony, broadband and mobile sectors. as such, I would love to see competition in the water market.

Whilst I accept that financial savings may be minimal, I do believe that competition would be likely to improve customer service. Long term, I would also hope that there could be competition in the actual supply of water services. Other posters have commented about the higher than average costs imposed by some suppliers, such as those in Wales and the south-west. I have family dotted all over the UK , and am very aware of these differences. I would welcome some equality when it comes to the costs that water companies are forced to pay , for example, to maintain clean rivers and beaches. this could then leave all water companies able to compete on both price AND service, which would really shake the industry up.

For a first step though, I think that competition within service levels, with the possibility of a modest savings, is an excellent move!

JRuss

This I am sure is contrary to the way things are heading but this is my experience.

I recently moved from Scotland to the south-east of England, in Scotland domestic customers pay for their water at the same time as their council tax. That isn't to say that the councils provide the water, just that when properties receive their council tax bills it also includes a section for water which (presumably) when paid the council forwards to Scottish Water. Moving to England, I found water to be very similar to every other utility - it was another company to contact online (by email and then by phone to get the account set up in the case of Thames Water), another direct debit to administer, more paperwork to be sent out to manage the account online.

In my opinion the Scottish model is a far simpler arrangement for both Scottish Water and householders. One less direct debit for me and everyone else in Scotland and one less thing to think about - especially when moving house. For Scottish Water it must also mean that they have a far smaller admin department, as they don't need to process change of addresses, set up direct debits, send bills, chase arrears etc. I would be interested to know from the regulator if there would be a saving if we moved to this model instead (putting aside nationalisation for the moment)?

I should point out before I am corrected that Scottish Water is owned by the Scottish Government and domestic customers cannot have water meters installed (which does go against my green principles).

In general I do believe in a free market. However, with something so basic as water and something that is so prohibitively expensive to transfer from one area to another, a free market would mean an economy based on nothing more than flashy adverts and varying customer service departments. Ultimately amounting to a whole water economy based on not a great deal of anything but a lot of bureaucracy.

deanos

emmakelley wrote: »

I'd love to be able to change water supplier. Living in Cornwall under South West Water, we are (I believe) in the most expensive area in the country for water bills. .

You will still live in the most expensive part of the country, as OFWAT say its around a £6 saving a year

If you switched supplier they will still be buying water from SWW and it will still be the most expensive

renarichards

i pay twice as much here in hastings as i did in harrow for my water - i would welcome the competition, and am amazed that it is still allowed to have a monopoly - why???????
regards, rena

chrisr789

Please can we stop messing around and return water (as well as electricity, gas and railways) to public ownership. All the regulation and attempts at 'tweaking the market' have manifestly failed to benefit ordinary people - instead we have sectors that used to be owned by us and run for us now owned by profit-driven shareholders and foreign governments! If the primary motivation of water companies is profit, not provision of service, they will ultimately always act to achieve that primary goal, at the expense of the rest of us.

So please, no more talk about making markets work for us. For utilities, transport, education and health - services we all need - bring them back into public ownership so that we can:

1) democratically control our public services through our local authorities and national government,
2) make sure that the workers who provide our public services are paid and treated fairly,
3) ensure that all surpluses are spent on investment in our services, not on lining the pockets of wealthy shareholders.

Whether you want to call it renationalisation, a return to public ownership, or just giving us back our own services, let's accept that the privatisation experiment has failed and get on with putting things right.

Mr_Noodles

Nobody cares. Nobody wants this. No one woke up this morning and thought “You know what? I really want to buy my water from some random company I’ve never heard of.”

Remember Directory Enquiries? A few years ago, you rang 192 and an efficient BT employee told you the number you wanted. And then some ding-a-ling in the Department of Infinite Wisdom decided it all had to change, not because there was anything wrong with what we’d been doing for decades, but because we had to have “more choice”. And now there are two hundred different phone numbers to ring, and no one knows how much the service costs. That’s progress for you.

“More choice”, you may remember was the Major government’s mantra. Academic studies have shown that people in general make poor choices, especially when presented with too many options. There is such a thing as too much choice.
But no, electricity and gas had to be privatised. If it moves, privatise it. We then ended up with Purposeful Price Confusion: in other words, a strategy to baffle people so much that they can’t make a rational decision. Enter the comparison web sites, bottom feeders if ever there were such a thing.

HM Government’s line is that you can “switch and save” and “shop around” for your energy. You know what? No one gives a damn. No one wants to spend ages typing their details into comparecomparecomparecompare.com in order to save tuppence on their bill. And who could blame them? We’ve all got better things to do.

Has it not occurred to anyone that these energy suppliers are chasing a finite number of customers? How much money, time and effort is spent by each company in order to try and poach another company’s customer, when the same customer may well leg it to another.

Is it in anyone’s interest for water to go the way of electricity and gas? Of course not. The result will be confusion, customer churn, miss selling (again), yet more leaflets through my letter box trying to sell me something I already have.

Utilities are not exciting or sexy. No one gives a damn about water, and even fewer about sewage.

This proposal is a solution without a problem. It’s change for the sake of change, led by a government hell-bent on meddling with things for reasons of dogma rather than any need.

D_M_E

The quoted savings just don't add up.

The total savings quoted are £2,600,000,000 yet the savings per customer are given as only about £7 per customer.

If there is one supply per person for every man, woman and child in the country then that makes about 70,000,000 supplies or a total of about £490,000,000.

Where does the remaining £2,110,000,000 saving go?

Smodlet

Oh, come now, D_M_E, where do you think? In the fat cats' pockets, of course! Gotta keep the little people in their place, right?

Some brilliant posts on here tonight!