Cut Thames Water bill WITHOUT a meter

A question about : Cut Thames Water bill WITHOUT a meter

Did you know that besides the old rateable-value method or a meter there is a third way of being charged for water? And that it might save you hundreds of pounds a year?

Quite likely not. But there is. It's called an assessed charge. It's meant for properties that can't have a meter fitted (for instance, a flat that hasn't the space, or the access, or gets its hot water from a boiler that serves the whole block). It's a set figure--depends which water company--for a one-person or two-person household, maybe with variation for the number of bedrooms.

If your flat's rateable value is high, you could save a bomb this way. Trouble is, you have to know about it, apply for a meter, be told you can't have one but there is this assessed charge. And not many people do know.

The Times on August 1st carried a story about a lady who was being charged Ј980 a year by Thames Water on the rateable-value basis. Her assessed charge--she lives on her own--would have been only Ј165. In four years she reckons she reckons she's been overcharged some Ј3,200. She'd never heard of assessed charges.

Why not? Because (let's be polite about this) Thames Water didn't exactly ram the news down her throat. Nor do many other companies.

I've seen a 2008 Thames Water pamphlet--one of those things that mostly tell you what a splendid lot your utility company is. Right at the start, it cheerily mentions rateable-value and meter charging as if those were the only two alternatives. The mere existence of Thames Water's assessed household charge is buried (and even then without a hint that it might be much cheaper) in an article deep inside the pamphlet, under the heading Thinking about a water meter?

How many sensible people who know their flat can't have a meter spend their time doing that? So how many would ever read an article with that title--even if they do plough through things like Thames Water's self-congratulatory flannel? Not many.

The company's website has more information. But if you don't know this method of charging exists you sure have to click and click and click to come upon it. And how many little old ladies--or little old men--on their own use the Web anyway?

So the very people who could gain from an assessed charge are the least likely to learn about it.

How many tens of thousands of water bills, and how many extra hundreds of pounds a year from each one, does that add up to? A nice little earner for Thames Water--most of which would come abruptly to a stop if they publicised this third method of charging properly. How odd that they don't. Wonder why not.

Best answers:

• Assessed charges for properties where a meter cannot be fitted has been covered scores of times in this section of MSE.
  The number of properties where meters cannot be fitted are relatively few, and as they tend to be mainly older flats, if they have a low RV many will not be advantaged by having an assessed charge.
  I would certainly agree with you that more publicity should be given to the assessed charges scheme, but of course to find out if you qualify for that scheme you have to apply for a meter, and many have an irrational fear of meters. You might ask why the lady in the Times article had not applied for a meter?
  However there is one major flaw in your post.
  Quote:
• Thank you. Cardew, But alas, not everyone reads MSE, let alone as regularly and over the years as you do. So:
  1. Why did the lady in the Times article not apply for a meter? Her words, as quoted in The Times: "...because the building is not suitable". She plainly knew she couldn't get one. Nothing there suggests any irrational fear of meters. In conrast, it is indeed "irrational" to apply for something which you know can't be done.
  Unless, of course, you can get some advantage thereby--which she didn't know she could. And, as The Times commented: "It is astonishing that no one at Thames Water told you that Ј980 a year is steep for anyone...nor advised you of ways to bring it down."
  2. "The number of properties where meters can't be fitted is relatively few". Not in London it isn't. Nor are they all by any means of low rateable value. And even if that were so, it does not (as you agree with me) justify not publicising a charging method that would indeed save many of them large sums.
  3. I question your mechanistic view of water company finances. Ofwat's controls are fixed to cover the broad numbers, overall, and in advance and over a period of years. But they are not applied automatically, nor varied every month, to take account of every variation in revenue.
• If enough rateable-value households switch to an assessed charge to cut Thames Water's revenue by Ј1 million a year, no doubt Ofwat will take account of that when next it fixes the figures for the period ahead. But surely it won't fix them in a way that not just avoids a future shortfall for Thames Water but allows the company to make up accumulated shortfalls from the past? Maybe two or three million quid or more, depending just when this happens in the figure-fixing cycle? "Nice little earner" seems to me a fair description for the way Thames Water gains by leaving its (tied) 'customers' in ignorance.
  Cardew is certainly right in thinking there should be more publicity for the assessed charge. But so is Sardarjee in saying there are plenty of people who don't know about it.
  I was one, till I read the piece in the Times. Our London flat is in a large block with a comunal boiler. So we all know we can't have a meter. So--with maybe one or two exceptions--I don't think anybody has asked for one. I'm pretty sure few of us can ever have heard of an 'assessed charge', or we would have.
  That lack of information has cost me a total of around Ј1,500 over the past seven years. It may have cost my upstairs neighhbour--a single occupant of a high-rated flat--around Ј3,000.
  Why hasn't Thames Water told us about its 'assessed household charge'? When I contacted the company, I was told it was company "policy" not to inform a customer of this method of charging until it was "applicable" to their house or flat--ie until after they had asked for a meter and a survey had shown that one couldn't be fitted! Why on earth not?!
  Is that fair? Is it honest? What would you think if the only garage for 20 miles around for many years let you think that the only fuel suitable for your ancient high-performance BMW was the garage's patent HyperWhizzLeadedPowerGas at hyper-high prices--and then you discovered (no thanks to the garage) that all the time you could have been using ordinary unleaded 95-octane at an ordinary price?
  And when you asked the garage why it hadn't told you long ago, it blandly replied "Oh, most people with old cars think what you did, and they're wrong. But until you ask us for a special engine check it's company policy not to tell you."
  I am seeking to be repaid the Ј1,500 that Thames Water and its policy of deliberate policy of don't-tell-the-customer have cost me. They of course are refusing. I suggest anyone who has suffered for similar reasons should (a) at once demand a meter, even though they know they can't have one; (b) demand to be repaid the total overcharge of past year; and (c) get in touch with Ofwat asking for its help, pointing out that this is a serious policy issue, not one of the odd individual grievance.
  Even elephants can be shifted if they get enough pinpricks
• Thank you Sardarji for raising this issue, and thank you very much Stephenhj for making me feel slightly better because I am not alone in getting a bad deal. I am a few hundred pounds out of pocket because TW did not tell me exactly what I needed to know. It is really my fault for trusting them and assuming that they would look after my interests in the most efficient manner and get me the best deal.
  I first heard about the Assessed Household Charge in March 2008 - from Metro newspaper not Thames Water - and immediately applied online and over the phone to go on it. I did not know that it was necessary to go through the motions of applying for a meter, and I knew that I could not have one. When the bill for 2008/09 came, I wrote to ask why I was still on the standard charge - no reply.
  I am STILL not on this charge: I am back to square one and need to apply for a meter, despite sending evidence to TW that I can't have one. I live in a mixed-use block, other residents have applied and been told there is no chance. I even have a letter from TW that says that the flats in my block cannot have individual meters.
  TW's customer service department were not at all helpful. It was only a few months ago that I suddenly realised that the only way to get onto the AHC is to apply for a meter. I thought that by telling them that I could not have one I could save them trouble, jump the queue and get on the AHC much more quickly. There was a lot of correspondence, they strung things out and kept me dangling. They asked for a copy of the letter from TW, my main 'evidence'. They did not reply to this. I never received the letter that they wrote to me in 2007 in response to my enquiry, they eventually sent me a copy and I saw immediately that it did not have my name and address on it: they use window envelopes so no wonder I never got it.
  I eventually learned that only people who applied for a meter in the past and been rejected were invited to apply for the AHC. TW completely overlooked anyone who did not apply because they know they could not have one.
  I feel completely drained and defeated, but I need to start the ball rolling in time for FY 2010/11.
  I am considering complaining to OFWAT, but TW have told me that I won't get compensation because it was up to me to apply for a meter. The AHC started as from April 2008 by the way.
  The following link shows that this issue is known:
  https://www.theyworkforyou.com/whall/...7-05-23b.484.0
• I am the very last person that should be accused of defending Water Companies. The Water privatisation Bill(thank you Maggie!) put them in a Win/Win position and their approach toward customers is a disgrace in many cases.
  An even more disgraceful and widespread situation than the assessed charge, is the 'default position' where all properties(on RV or Meter charges) are charged for Surface Water Drainage(SWD). Many, probably millions, simply are not aware that they should not be paying this charge as none of their surface water enters the sewer. Properties built in the last 30 years were not allowed to have water enter sewers(except in very rare cases) but they are still automatically charged for SWD
  Customers not only have to be aware of this unfair charge, but apply for exemption and prove that their water does not enter a sewer.
  SWD, like assessed charges in lieu of meters, was a legal requirement under the Water Act so the Water companies are not to blame. However where they are completely culpable is not mounting a campaign to make householders aware of the situation.
  Quote:
• This is the ofwat position on backdating charges. Whilst if refers to SWD the principle applies to assessed charges.
  Quote:
• 1. Forgive me, Cardew, but you really are mistaken. In finance, cash-flow timing counts. The figures that control water company charges are not fixed, as I understand it, every year "for the year ahead" but for five years ahead. So a 'shortfall' in company revenue in year A will not be allowed-for for anything up to A-plus-five years later. And even then that's for the future, the company won't recoup its past shortfalls. "Nice little earner" is just the phrase for the result of leaving some unlucky consumers in ignorance.
  2. More important for the new assessed-charge consumer, he'll be lucky to get any repayment backdated even to the start of the current charging-year. Thames Water tells me that their assessed charge only starts from the time this charge becomes applicable to the individual flat, even if the flat could have been on this basis for years. Ie, after its owner has first learned that the assessed charge exists and then has gone through the entire process of applying for a meter that he knows he can't have, been surveyed, etc etc.
  The fact that water companies have no legal obligation to backdate beyond the current year does not--in Thames's view--mean that they have any obligation to backdate even that little distance.
  I don't know what Ofwat thinks of this. But even if it disagrees, why stop there? Why does it blithely accept this limit to backdating? Its reasoning is weird. Why on earth should other consumers be (in theory) liable to make up the money if water companies had to repay some victims for years of overcharging? If some cowboy cheated you for years, would you accept (or any court adjudge) that he should repay you for only one year?
  Why should water company overcharging be different? After all, it didn't happen by accident. As I now know from Thames Water, it's that company's deliberate policy to delay telling potential beneficiaries of the very existence (let alone the details or likely benefits) of assessed charges.
  3. Thank you, Cardew, for telling me about the novelty of the single-person charge. If it's really that recent, I may have overstated my neighbour's costs. But certainly not those of our two-bedroom, two-person flat--or countless others like us.
• To PlutoinCapricorn. Go ahead--you and any other victims of Thames Water's s non-information policy. Raise Cain with Ofwat and anyone else. Ofwat are trying to shuffle me off to the powerless consumers council for water, but if enough people shout they may realise they can't do that to all of us.
• The issues raised in this thread have made me realise that it is useless to wish that, just as the Home Telephones thread has official BT reps, the Water Companies would have their own reps on MSE.
  The BT guys seem really good, and step forward to intervene on behalf of BT customers who are at the end of their tether. They seem to get their affairs sorted out very quickly. Unfortunately, with Thames Water it is a matter of policy not mistakes made on individual accounts. If they will not back date compensation, nor take responsibility for ensuring that their customers are aware of all their options, nor make provision for people who want meters but don't apply because they know that they can't have them, then there is not much that anyone can do about it as an individual.
  I really believed that if I provided TW with a lot of evidence that I am a very low user of water and that I am unable to have a meter, they would immediately put me on the AHC (followed by the recent single occupant tariff) as from the date of my first application. It took a long time before I realised that they would or could not do this.
  I will certainly summarise my own experience for OFWAT: I know that everything is ultimately my responsibility but I have been fobbed off and delayed. The stupidity, waste of resources and bureaucracy is very depressing.
  I was delighted to see that Andrew Smith MP had raised many of these issues in Parliament: we all seem to agree that TW do not tell people what their options are, and that the people who most need to be aware of them are the least likely to know what tariffs are available. Not everyone is able to go online and do some research.
• I remember seeing a post by someone who had changed to a water meter, and was asking about repayments as he had been overcharged for years. I agreed with responders who said that there had been no overcharging, he could have applied for a meter at any time.
  However, with the special tariffs, it is not so black and white I think. Who hasn't heard of water meters? The "self congratulatory literature" that is stuffed in with our annual bills does feature them (but of course we people who can't have one will not read these pages). But the special tariffs are not publicised, and are sometimes concealed. I remember years ago receiving my annual bill, and there was a number to phone for people who had trouble meeting the payments. I phoned it, and was told that all they could offer was the chance to pay in installments - which I had been doing for years! There was actually a social tariff that might have helped.
  In 2000, I believe that the Average Household Charge (not the recent Assessed HC) was introduced, it would have saved me a lot too, but I never heard about it.
  I still think that TW try to get people onto meters if they think that they will raise more money this way - large houses, gardens that need watering and cars that need washing etc.- and stall people such as me who would pay a lot less. And I just can't understand why the only way to get onto the Assessed HC is to apply for a meter and be rejected. Why can't some people be fast tracked?
• Assessed charges are not really a "proper" rate of charge. It is a tariff offered to people who have applied for a water meter and could not have one fitted.
  No company would put someone onto assessed without first seeing if a meter was possible ( or in the case of a altered property it is used whilst everything else is being set up)
  Your options are meter or RV and assessed is only an option if there is no chance of a meter but even if you are on assessed now if a meter could be fitted now (say a change in pipe work or lay out of the building ) then the water company will attempt to fit a meter.
  To be fair and honest all customers should have a meter but sometime that is just not possible.
  Putting people on meters does not raise more money for the water companies as their amount of allowed profit is fixed by OFWAT.
• After having a few problems with Thames Water and the last one being over getting a water meter assessment appointment, I strongly suggest if Thames Water are giving you the run around email the Consumer Council For Water. https://www.ccwater.org.uk/
  In my case I knew I couldn't have a water meter so applied for one. Thames Water took 8 months to even arrange the appointment for a meter assessment, and were charging me for the on the rateable value in the mean time.
  As I pay my bill twice yearly I worked out when I applied for a water meter, that by the time I was on the assessed charge my second water bill would be due. Therefore I complained to The Consumer Council For Water by email as a result I was charged the assessed charge for the second 6 months of the year.
• SO DOES OFWAT CARE?
  "Why hasn't Thames Water told us"--ie, people like me who cannot have a meter--"about its 'assessed household charge'? When I contacted the company, I was told it was company "policy" not to inform a customer of this method of charging until it was "applicable" to their house or flat--ie until after they had asked for a meter and a survey had shown that one couldn't be fitted! Why on earth not?!
  Is that fair? Is it honest?"
  That's what I wrote in my first post. And I imagined that Ofwat might share my dislike of Thames's deliberate non-publicity for the charge.
  How wrong I was! Thames told me that Ofwat in fact approves of this policy. I couldn't believe this: after all, Ofwat invented the 'assessed charge'. So I questioned Ofwat. And, heaven help us, Thames is right. A long email from Ofwat makes it clear-crystal clear that that body actively does NOT WANT publicity for the assessed charge! And that Ofwat does not give a damn that the result is that some victims (a lot of us, I suspect) have for years been paying wildly more under 'rateable value' than they'd have paid under 'assessed charge', if they'd been told it existed and how to get it.
  I quote Ofwat: "We support metering, and expect companies to promote [it].... We do not expect a company to actively promote another unmeasured charge which is only available in very limited circumstances". (Ie, "not many victims, so why bother?" Even if that view were acceptable, in London there are in fact lots)
  And not merely does Ofwat "not expect" but "We do not support active promotion of another unmeasured charge..."
  Oh, why not? Because "metering should be promoted as the fairest way of charging, any unmeasured charge is a poor substitute. The onus has to be to promote metering."
  In plain English. "If you cannot have a meter, there are two alternative methods of charging. Given that choice, we don't mind in the least if you have to pay through the nose under one of them, 'rateable value', but we actively don't want you informed about the other one, the 'assessed charge', which could cut your bill to a fair size".
  Yet the two methods are both equally "unmeasured".
  For myself, I'd indeed love to have a meter, but I've always known that our communal hot water makes that impossible--as Thames and I agree. That being so, I'd find a reasonably fair 'assessed charge' (Ј230, reflecting what similar households actually use) a very acceptable substitute for a 'rateable-value' one of more than double the size (Ј485).
  But of course its just me (and probably many thousands of others) who has to pay the monstrous 'rateable value' bill. Not Ofwat.
  And Ofwat plainly couldn't care less that people like me are paying through the nose. So much for a body one of whose jobs is (as its writing-paper puffs) to protect consumers!
  PS to Cardew: I'm glad we agree on the crucial matter of publicity. But I think you misinterpret Ofwat when it says "For every customer who does not pay the charge, all others have to pay slightly more. If the rebate were backdated, then there would need to be a corresponding backdated increase in other bills."
  What Ofwat is implying is "...which of course would be wildly impractical.". So in the real world one customer's rebate would NOT mean an increase for others, to make up the company's takings. And in practice...suppose not just one but even 5,000 people decide tomorrow morning that they cannot afford to pay the water bill: can one really think the other several millions of Thames Water's customers will all be asked for a backdated increase? I don't. Sure, come the next Ofwat "determination" this would be taken into account. But till then I think Thames would have to suffer. Poor dears.
• Stephenhj, thank you once again for making me feel that I am not alone. And thank you for getting Ofwat's position for people like us, it has saved me the trouble of explaining everything to them.
  I was disgusted by what they said: I am on a very low income, and have always been a very light user of water as I live alone in a tiny flat and have never had a dishwasher or washing machine, so they are being very unfair to people like me in my opinion. I would have saved a small fortune over the decades if I had been charged for what I actually used, or on a realistic assessment.
  I had been hoping for an 11th hour miracle, but now see that I have no choice but to apply for a meter. This means that I have missed 2 years on the low tariff.
  I can't see any other reason for TW's behaviour than that they get more money from me this way. If they won't lose anything from the special tariffs, why don't they publicise them?
  I know that new builds in residential areas are now fitted with meters, but mixed use blocks are very common in London and perhaps other cities. People whose flats are on top of a car park or offices and shops in these blocks are being treated very unfairly I think. Perhaps some are very wealthy and are happy to pay the standard rate, but I certainly am not.
• PlutoinCapricorn and others. No, don't give up. If enough people kick Ofwat, even it might have a rethink.
  Here we have Ofwat, a body that around 2000-01 invents, and insists that companies must offer, a tariff that would be tolerably fair to small households--and yet hates the idea that they should be told about it, for fear they would take the offer up! That's logical, ain't it?
  And to say Ofwat or anyone else is merely applying "policy" is neither here nor there--policy can be daft as a brush or bent as two pins, it doesn't have any virtue just by being policy.
  And if Ofwat could be kicked and shoved into seeing the absurdity of its views, who knows it might not just change them but even tell the monopoly water-suppliers not only to publicise the assessed charge in future but to recompense at least some of the massive injustices that their (and Ofwat's) deliberate silence has led to up till now. (Not that I'm holding my breath: couldn't-care-less goes hand in hand with here-we-are-here-we-stay complacency)
  Ofwat's rationale for its bizarre support of secrecy is that some people on assessed charges would be getting a subsidy from other consumers, because their real consumption would be higher than the charge implies. This is pitiful clutching at straws. Sure, overall, people do use more of anything when they don't have to pay extra; and no doubt there are households that will take eight baths a day when they know it costs them nothing; though there are others who, even when that is so, still use less water than the average metered household of a similar sort. No unmetered charging system can be strictly fair to everyone, or as between metered and unmetered.
  But the fact is: you have to have some kind of unmeasured charge for the unmeterable household. Which is fairer: the assessed-charge system that would indeed subsidise some extravagant households, at the cost of a few pennies extra on all consumers' bills; or rateable-value which means that some of us have been paying hundreds of pounds a year more than we would have if Ofwat and the companies had ensured we were properly informed, rather than doing the exact opposite?
  Putting a speed limit on some dangerous road will cost nearly all motorists a minute or so extra on their journey. Would that be a good reason not do it, if we knew that having no limit meant an extra (and proven) dozen deaths a year?
• Stephen, you are right: I really should not accept the situation without first letting OFWAT and the Water Consumer organisation know what I think of the policies. I don't expect that anything will come of it, but it is the right thing to do.
  I have read some of the old postings, and realise that these issues are well known and have been raised from time to time. The postings by littleangel of 5/2/2005 and activepensioner of 19/8/2005 are good examples. Apparently it is not only the case that water companies are not obliged to publicise the special tariffs, according to OFWAT they are not PERMITTED to. I also found someone who said that the engineer who came to see if a meter could be fitted said that it was a waste of time because he had already visited other flats in the block and they could not have meters. What inefficiency.
  I know that different water companies have different rules and tariffs, and that the names and amounts change over the years. However, on the basis of Thames Water's recent estimate of how much a small, single person houseold would pay if they had a meter, I have been paying a lot more for many years. So I may have been subsiding people with three or more children, as apparently they get a discount. And the latest assessed tariffs are still higher than the meter estimate, so assuming that I eventually do get on, I will still be paying more than I should and I am sure that this applies to many other people.
  BT actually invited targetted people to join their Light User tariff, which is subsidised: OFCOM insisted on this. The Council Tax Single Person's Discount is mentioned on the bills. Why is water different? I think that the explanations are feeble, and don't make any sense.