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

pigfarmer

I want to choose. Southern water are atrocious. They put up prices and ignore leaks one leak in a local lane has been for over ten yes ten years. They can't seem to fix it. The waste over all those years is outrageous.
One cold snowy winter a pipe burst locally early one morning. Pavement was lifted 2 feet in the air. I rang southern waters emergency number. Person on that emergency number said he couldn't hear me as the phone he was using was faulty!!!!! Really. You're the emergency line.
I carried on farming for the day. Later same lane ten hours later leak not fixed. Minus 4 degrees. Oodles of water. Not fixed. A real danger on road. I rang the after hours service and they came and fixed it. Poor workers in cold and dark. BUT the cost in overtime, lost water etc.
Billing. Don't get me started. The water on our farmland runs off into our ditches. Then eventually it joins up with next farms ditches and so on. Southern water began adding waste water charges. A fight ensued. Rhen they gave us a tour of the waterworks as compensation.
They are not efficient. When wr wanted a new water supply connected a few years ago i was told to write a hand written letter to them as the woman who dealt with new connections luked a hand written letter. It's the 21st century and I'd like to choose a better supplier. A friend's farm less than 2 miles away has a different water company and its cheaper. Ridiculous situation all round. Closed market. Ir must be opened up to competition.

badmemory

pigfarmer wrote: »

Ridiculous situation all round. Closed market. Ir must be opened up to competition.

It won't be real competition though. When you change supplier and have a problem you will ring them and they will tell you they don't deal with that & you will have to ring the original supplier because it is their area. But they will have absolutely no incentive to fix it because you are not paying them your other supplier is.

What will happen is every time you speak to them you will get stuck on there whilst they try to sell you another service such as gas & electric.

ellendexter

No thank you!

I am sick of the onus being on me, the consumer, to spend more and more of my precious and limited 'leisure time' wading through various websites and tracking my energy usage on spreadsheets etc to try to save money on energy bills, insurance, rail fares etc etc etc. just to ensure I'm not being ripped off. This doesn't take the two minutes or so advertised, it can take hours each time, especially if your internet connection is not super-fast. I really object to wasting all this time - necessary because we are living on a very low income and cannot afford the luxury of not doing all these comparisons. Because all these companies are offering loss leader tariffs to those consumers savvy, educated and dedicated enough to choose/switch to them, at the expense of the elderly/uneducated/ill/busy people who for various reasons are unable to give the time/resources/know-how to switch, who are being ripped off in order to subsidise the switchers.

Where is this going to end? I would rather that the companies had fewer tariffs/fares etc (how about just one, reasonable, flat rate for energy or water or a rail journey from A to B which everyone pays?) then we could be spending all that wasted switching time as quality time with our families instead? I wonder how many people go to their graves saying "Well I used my time on earth well, I saved all that money on my bills at the expense of the poor people who never switched anything." Never mind that my children missed out on a trip to the playpark, or my partner watched the film on his own because I was glued to the computer screen for two and a half hours trying to save £20 on some train tickets by trying umpteen different combinations of route or split, or time of travel, or checking which energy companies offer Warm Home Discount as well as a tempting tariff.

Why do you think more people (like me) are now shopping at Aldi and Lidl? Because, and this might come as a shock to all those politicians and business people who think choice and market forces are the answer to everything, we don't all want choice! Just like I don't want to spend ten minutes comparing ingredients lists on 16 different bottles of ketchup, then consider whether it is cheaper to buy one big bottle and get 50 reward points or 3 small bottles for the price of two etc etc - we just want to grab one reasonably priced bottle of ketchup, ditto for the other 40 items on the shopping list, then get out of there and get on with more important things in life. The reason I haven't switched bank in 25 years is because (shock!) they give me a satisfactory service. I probably could make a few £s by switching and I'm sure it is quick to switch to a rival bank offering a few percent cashback on my bills for a few months but I'm not interested in the hassle, when my current bank is satisfactory. Note "satisfactory", ie not necessarily the best, but good enough.

I don't want or need water companies to compete for my business, I just want my local one to be good. (A bit like schools).

Please do the job of regulating properly yourselves. It's your job to set the high standards and rules and caps etc and to then police them. It is not acceptable to pass the buck onto consumers by expecting us to be continually comparing and switching everything.

MilkyJoe

Who wouldn't want to save 11p a week?

John_Pierpoint

Cardew wrote: »

I am sorry but your post is just 'management speak' platitudes!

Please expand on the last paragraph- particularly 'best decision'

For example currently a family of 4 on SW Water metered tariff using the UK average of 220 cubic metres a year pay:

Water 194.84p/m3 and £37.20pa standing charge
waste water 339.54p/m3 and £38.42 standing charge.

Thus an annual charge of £1,251.26

For the same consumption in, say, Thames Water* the same consumption(220m3) will cost £553.62

The real problem in this country facing the water companies is the rapidly increasing population .
It was up 513,000 last year and 100,000 + of that was inside the M25.

The result is an overspill of 10's of thousands of families to be "socially cleansed" into the poor districts of the home counties plus 10's of thousands of the new property rich fleeing the capital into the desirable districts.
These areas are all expected to build exponentially to receive their new residents and the water companies will have to find the tonnes of water each family needs.
Here in South Essex I am paying £41.45 per year plus £1.4689 per tonne (1,000 litres).
This cost has been spiralling upwards each year BUT in view of the engineering required I am not surprised.
[My waste water goes through two chambers and then percolates down hill under half an acre of garden - if it ain't broke don't fix it].

A generation ago my water came from the chalk that underlays the London Basin, but it was judged un drinkable out here because it was polluted. [I eventually got my hands on the analysis but as it was all expressed in ions, it did not identify the source of the pollution - much of it might have been over pumping sucking in sea water, but it could have been 100 years of acting as London's toxic waste dump].


Now as I understand it the water originates in the Ouse (Think Fenland), The good people of Chelmsford get to drink it first and the outflow from their sewageworks is piped into Hanningfiled reservoir, then it grows large quantities of green strands which are dragged out to reduce the nitrogen content, eventually it gets all sorts of treatments including splashing down an ultraviolet staircase.

A special sort of slow release chlorine is added, to allow for the fact that the water could be in the pipes for a week if it is destined for (say) Foulness. Some people say it tastes funny but I find it acceptable because all water is very second or perhaps sixth hand here anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_and_Suffolk_Water

The water here is owned by the Chinese as is the electricity supply network, so there is scope for single billing:T

Seriously though the water industry has a lot more challenges than poaching each other's customers.

mgarl10024

ellendexter wrote: »

Why do you think more people (like me) are now shopping at Aldi and Lidl? Because, and this might come as a shock to all those politicians and business people who think choice and market forces are the answer to everything, we don't all want choice!

Because there is an open market and you have the choice to shop at the store which provides the mix of cost, customer service, and product availability that meets your needs.
If you didn't, you'd be shopping at a state run supermarket which would be the only one in town, charging prices you had no ability to avoid, and a service which you may or may not find acceptable.

roms

Without reading everyone's view i believe choice to choose a company is better. We are used to choosing our gas and/or electric. As long as it is well regulated, transparent pricing and not a monopoly/oligopoly then should be helpful for all.

matelodave

roms wrote: »

Without reading everyone's view i believe choice to choose a company is better. We are used to choosing our gas and/or electric. As long as it is well regulated, transparent pricing and not a monopoly/oligopoly then should be helpful for all.

And what makes you think that OFWAT is going to be able to do that. OFGEM hasn't managed it in all the time it's been involved in the energy market, they don't take any resposnibilty, they hand it over to an ombudsman (where did that stupid tile come from) to try and sort out problems - which they frequently don't.

The cost for all of this comes from the customer as he's the one who pays for it all in his bills.

I'm all in favour of competition but we do need regulators that regulate and have the teeth to enforce regulations and in a timely manner. Fines aren't the answer as we all end up paying them through higher bills. They need something that gives them real pain when they transgress or don't perform

Some of the pathetic attempts to bring Scottish Power, NP and others into line have been laughable.

Smodlet

Nationalise it and regulate the fat cats' salaries. Make them performance related. For the generations who do not know what nationalised means, there is google.

If ever there was a case for nationalisation, this is it.

happyinflorida

I would definitely like to be able to change due to the fact that in the South East of the UK we are ripped off big time by our water company "South East Water" that decided many moons ago to split itself into two and have two companies one delivering drinking water and the other taking away sewerage and waste water. I now have to pay nearly £90 a month for their two bills and am not happy to do so at all.

I also know that people in the South West are charged an extortionate amount of money for their drinking water by yet another private company all thanks to the conservative party allowing these services to be privatised.

Many people are getting into debt trying to pay their water bill.

One thing that many people do not know is that legally you cannot have your water supply cut off by the water companies if you are struggling to pay your bills. This is because water is considered an essential to life whereas you won't die if your gas or electricity is cut off. This needs to be kept law to help people who are struggling financially.