Water Company Payment without Billing me

oh_not_she

Hello all,

I received an email demanding payment for nearly £1k for waste water charges for my old address.

I moved out nearly 3 years ago and informed the company I was paying my bills to (never missed a payment).

Issue is they were not supposed to be taking payment for Waste water.

The company that should have been never made contact and all my attempts of making contact (when I found out) failed as we were just coming out of lockdown. (I left voicemail for a callback)

I am in contact with them now regarding the matter. But no one seems to know what to do! I’m not paying the new tenants charges and they haven’t even sent me a bill. Just demanding emails and text messages.

I have a paper trail of when I stopped being responsible for the property, did all the detective work for them and got the last meter readings.

I am worried that if I click one of these payment links I am admitting liability for the huge amount they are requesting.

Any advice would be appreciated, I feel like I am getting nowhere! 

jbuchanangb

You should owe someone for wastewater charges while you were the occupier of the property, but obviously not after you left. Which companies are involved? In some places customers are billed by two different suppliers, one for water supply and one for waste water. Is that what has happened? You paid for water supply at that property but never paid for wastewater processing? 

Insist that they send you a bill for the period concerned, and check it against the water supply bills for that time. Back in the day when Essex & Suffolk supplied my water, and Anglian took it away, Anglian billed for 90% of the volume which E&S had supplied.

oh_not_she

jbuchanangb said:

You should owe someone for wastewater charges while you were the occupier of the property, but obviously not after you left. Which companies are involved? In some places customers are billed by two different suppliers, one for water supply and one for waste water. Is that what has happened? You paid for water supply at that property but never paid for wastewater processing? 

Insist that they send you a bill for the period concerned, and check it against the water supply bills for that time. Back in the day when Essex & Suffolk supplied my water, and Anglian took it away, Anglian billed for 90% of the volume which E&S had supplied.

Ok, so I was with and am still with Southern water. They collected for both fresh and waste water. It was a new build property and it turned out that Leep should have been receiving payments for waste water and not Southern water. Our estate wasn’t showing as being there on their system so no-one was billed for 2 years. But all paying to Southern water. All refunded back to us eventually. But we all spent it thinking we had just overpaid and due refunds.

It didn’t just affect me but the whole estate and we ended up getting our local MP involved.

An agreement was made that everyone’s bills would be written off prior to January 2022.

I called and left voicemails with Leep during this time to set up an account. No one got back to me and I moved out summer of 2022 but was still responsible for all bills for the property until my notice was up in September 2022.

So nobody was in the house for 3 months.
Bill should be for Jan-Sep 2022 for waste water only.

I’ve called 4 times now and going around in circles. They keep demanding payment but have yet to supply me with an actual bill.

Who can I complain to regarding this?

How the heck can they demand payment without giving me an actual bill? I am super confused.

Cardew

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