Water bill for allotments

LongoBongo

Hi, wondering if anyone can help us out. We’ve got a new allotment site (14 months), it’s parish council and the allotment committee run everything. We’re being hammered for standing charges for water/sewerage. There are 34 half plots on the site.

The problem seems to be we have a small car park (8 cars) that drains into the public sewer network. There is no toilet or connection into the foul sewers, just the car park draining to the surface water sewer.

We’ve used about 25m3 of water over the six months that the tap is on which is less than £60 of water. Our bills though are £1,760 for the 14 months which is over 50% of our total revenue.

Can anyone comment if this is typical or if we’re being mightily ripped off with standing charges? Every month is over £120 in standing charges and about £5 in actual water. We’re billed through Water Plus if that helps.

If anyone has any advice it would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks

MikeJXE

If the problem is the car park drainage 

Get your spades out 

Dig a trench and divert the flow to a soakaway 

What is the surface of the car park ? 

LongoBongo

Thanks Mike, yeah, that was the plan if the charges are correct. It's tarmaced with ACO drain across the entrance, UU even came out to prove it was connecting to the sewers (which we already knew).

I was just the cost associated with it - wanted to check it was correct based on other's experiance.

I've looked at a bill, for a 31 day month we have the following

Surface Water Band Charge - £104.52

Highway Drainage Band Charge - £19.80

Total Standing Charges - £124.32 per month for a 250m2 car park - Crazy

Grizebeck

Definitely get a working party to change the arrangement