Severn Trent's flawed business model

Disgruntled3

Just had my bill for 2025 which is a 29% increase from last year, and by the way is a 97% increase since 2016.
They now have a cute little "what makes up your bill" explanation as to where your money goes. Well 11% goes on interest charges relating to borrowing (what decent company pays 11% to borrow money!) and 12% goes on returns on investments. That's 23% in total. So almost a quarter of our bill is for costs that have nothing to do with the actual supply of water. Imagine going into your coffee shop tomorrow and your Americano has overnight increased by 23% and the owner's explanantion is " I borrowed some money to pay myself a big fat profit and added all the costs to your cup of coffee"! 
I rang Severn Trent yesterday to discuss my bill and got an automated message that we have all heard to often "we are experiencing high blah blah blah and your wait time could be up to an hour" Just adds insult to injury that none of our 29% bill increase has gone on improving their service.
They are treating their customers like cash cows. How do we stop it?

Hoenir

May surprise you however most businessess borrow money in some form. I think you'll find that 11% of the money goes on interest payments. Not that the 11% is the interest rate. 

I think you'll find that the profit on your coffee is greater than 12% also. 

DullGreyGuy

Disgruntled3 said:

Well 11% goes on interest charges relating to borrowing (what decent company pays 11% to borrow money!) 

Your logic is flawed, that would only work if their revenue equaled their debt. In fact their debt is 3x their revenue so you need to divide the interest by 3 to get an approximate view of what the interest is

Disgruntled3 said:

Imagine going into your coffee shop tomorrow and your Americano has overnight increased by 23% and the owner's explanantion is " I borrowed some money to pay myself a big fat profit and added all the costs to your cup of coffee"! 

Do you know how much of your coffee cost actually is going to service debt like the mortgage on the building? I mean the debt of the parent company of Costa Coffee is $1.3bn