Are you being overcharged by your water company?
If your gutters drain to soakaways rather than into the public sewers, you can get a rebate on the standing charge element of your water bill. This rebate has been available since 2001, but you have to apply for it, it’s not automatic. I recently found out about this, and applied, because my gutters definitely don’t connect to the sewers – I had to pay a small fortune to get clogged soakaways cleared within the last couple of years, to stop flooding in my garden!
Hidden in the extremely small print on my water bill from South East Water – in a misleadingly-worded paragraph on page 6 of the 10-page bill – was a paragraph saying if I thought I was entitled, I should go to Thames Water’s website (because South East Water bill waste services on Thames Water’s behalf) and apply. Not a simple or straightforward process, anybody’d think they didn’t want you to find the online application, but I did it. A couple of weeks later I received a letter agreeing my application, saying I’d get a rebate backdated to April 2019.
I contacted Thames Water and asked them about the excess charges they’d levied since I moved to Hatch Warren in 1989. They replied that the rebate only became law from 2001, and they only have to rebate to the start of the financial year in which the application is made, if it is the first application made within that postcode. I complained, and was told, politely, to get lost. I took my complaint to the consumer council that’s supposed to look after water users, and was told Thames Water were correct. Apparently, the right to a rebate is “prominently” shown on South East Water’s bills (half way down page 6 of 10); so well advertised in fact that since the introduction of the rebate in 2001 I am the first resident of the 17 households in my postcode to have made an application.
I have subsequently discovered that a resident of a neighbouring postcode made a successful application in 2001, but through some “administrative error” the rebate was withdrawn when he died in 2011, and his widow has been overcharged for the last 8 years.
I live in a four bed detached house, and the rebate is about £26 per annum – not a lot, but why should Thames Water potentially get £26 to which they’re not entitled from every house in Hatch Warren/Beggarwood/Kempshott Rise? Multiply that across the Borough, and I bet they’re making millions because people don’t see their “prominent” information.
If your gutters drain to soakaways, apply for your rebate now. Go to https://myaccount.thameswater.co.uk/my-account/billing-andpayment/our-charges/metered-charges/apply-for-a-surface-water-drainage-rebate
Sam Weller
