keitha
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Post by keitha on Mar 17, 2021 14:04:03 GMT
so speaking to my partner,
she has a friend who is bad with money and owes the Water Board £720 because not paid anything for 2 years. The water board have accepted an offer of £10 a month towards current and future bills because they can't afford more,
Err hang on they are clocking up £30 a month bill and they are paying £10 a month. Surely that means this time next year the will owe £960 and so on.
BTW anyone know what the rules are on changing a direct debit ie how much notice they have to give, my Council tax payment is due at the start of April and the bill hasn't arrived as yet.
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Post by bernythedolt on Mar 17, 2021 19:52:34 GMT
so speaking to my partner, she has a friend who is bad with money and owes the Water Board £720 because not paid anything for 2 years. The water board have accepted an offer of £10 a month towards current and future bills because they can't afford more, Err hang on they are clocking up £30 a month bill and they are paying £10 a month. Surely that means this time next year the will owe £960 and so on. BTW anyone know what the rules are on changing a direct debit ie how much notice they have to give, my Council tax payment is due at the start of April and the bill hasn't arrived as yet. Ah, good old Dwr Cymru (Welsh Water for the uninitiated ). I rather like the fact that they are still a public utility and not there to make shareholders profits. My water bills are still lower than they were in England, even 5 years after moving to Wales. Has the friend misunderstood that the £10 is to pay off the arrears only, and they will still be expected to pay the regular bills on top of that? Any other scheme would sound crazy as you say...
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keitha
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Post by keitha on Mar 18, 2021 13:32:45 GMT
Nope £10 a month is what the direct debit has been set up too.
I think Welsh water is higher that the rest of the UK
in fact I just grabbed this from wales online
Customers at Welsh Water/Dwr Cymru will see average bills rise by 1% to £451.
Rates at Hafren Dyfrdwy will also rise by 1% to £300.
The averages have been calculated by Water UK.
But in England some suppliers will slash bills significantly.
A household supplied by Northumbrian will see a drop of £85 on average, while Wessex customers will enjoy bills reduced by 8% - a drop of £40 a year.
According to Water UK, which represents and works with most major suppliers, the new rates for 2020-2021 will see the average bill across England and Wales drop from £413.33 to £396.60.
so welsh water £50 a year more expensive than UK average
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jonno
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Post by jonno on Mar 18, 2021 13:50:35 GMT
Mm. Thinking about the title of this thread, I guess handling waste water is "a Potty System". It's just a bloody huge potty!!
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Mar 18, 2021 14:24:23 GMT
Yes I also like the idea of utilities and railways not making a profit out of me.
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Post by captainconfident on Mar 18, 2021 19:00:58 GMT
Yes I also like the idea of utilities and railways not making a profit out of me. Wasn't the Tories who practically handed those to commercial companies? I thought you were a fan theirs.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Mar 18, 2021 22:20:25 GMT
Yes I also like the idea of utilities and railways not making a profit out of me. Wasn't the Tories who practically handed those to commercial companies? I thought you were a fan theirs. Yes Thatcher did and sadly I was too young to benefit at the time. Privatising BT was a good move but most of the others went badly. Tell Sid its a bad idea. I like some policies from the Tories (economic mostly) and some from Corbyn's Labour (some nationalisation and ditching nuclear). Where I live the only way to influence politics and see how much of our cash is wasted is to join the most dominant party which doesn't make me a fan of theirs.
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Post by captainconfident on Mar 18, 2021 23:10:36 GMT
I appreciate your honesty. In a two party system, you can't unfortunately pick a bit from one and a bit from another but we are where we are. For the record, I agree with you completely on this which is a nice surprise.
I was all in favour of most privatisations, until the disaster of the railways. I remember the warnings before it happened, and as a Private Eye reader, I remember the managers of certain divisions becoming overnight millionaires for +/- £1000 investments. The idea that the railways had to make money never made much sense when the roads were and still are built and maintained from the public purse. It's for the public good that trains are laid on, so they should be charged for at cost.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Mar 19, 2021 13:36:17 GMT
Privatising BT was a good move
No it bloody well wasn't !
We are now left with the troublesome Openreach, and an incompetent politically-biased regulator, OFCOM, who steadfastly refuse to properly regulate Openreach, let alone force a true separation from its parent BT.
The details are too long and complex to explain on a forum post. But long and short of it is that the present situation is not good by any stretch of the imagination.
It is a heck of a lot better than it was as competition is working reasonably well in the sector with prices for fast broadband kept low. Yes there are certainly problems and I experienced a 2 week outage a couple of years ago when I swapped provider which was terrible given it was supposed to be seamless. But if you have just one provider (the government) there isn't the incentive for them to move quickly and offer new services etc. I'm just young enough not to remember life before privatisation but I'm told the service was very poor then. Gas, water, and electricity are different as you can't dynamically change the pipework routing if a customer wants to switch provider.
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adrianc
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Post by adrianc on Mar 19, 2021 14:08:37 GMT
The UK is in desperate need for a competent <pick a sector, any sector> regulator.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Mar 19, 2021 18:00:49 GMT
Since I'm feeling generous michaelc , let me give you one example.
Just one example in an ocean of others......
You decide you want to leave BT and take your phone number with you. BT ports your phone number to your new provider with minimal questions asked.
You, michaelc , would tell me OFCOM have done their job, BT have done their job, competition is working well.
And I suppose if you look at it through the eyes of the ultimate consumer, the garden does indeed seem to be rosy.
But let's grab that archaeologist's trowel shall we and start scraping at one little corner.
Hmm, that's interesting......
The current regulatory regime allows BT to force the company now holding your ported phone number to forward any and all future calls via BT for that number.
Oh, and what's that ?
Yes, that's right, the prices BT levy other providers for that gravy train are not regulated.
Thus your new phone provider is losing money by the second when you make use of your BT ported number. Your provider can't charge you for the majority of it either as the bulk of this gravy train applies to inbound calls to your number !
And that's not even the juiciest of examples !
UK telecoms regulation working "reasonably well" ? Yeah right !
So what else would you want to see taken into public ownership?
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keitha
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Post by keitha on Mar 19, 2021 18:44:18 GMT
Things to go to public ownership
Lets start with Water, and make Water meters compulsory. Each property gets a basic allowance lets say 120 cubic metres per year. If you use less you get a rebate, if you use more you pay more. the Basic 120 Cubic metres is paid for from general taxation.
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Mar 19, 2021 19:31:47 GMT
So what else would you want to see taken into public ownership?
I suggest you re-read my prior posts.
At no time did I state I wanted to see a return to public ownership. That would clearly not work, especially with a government such as the present one.
What I have said multiple times above is I want to see more effective regulation.
I want to see a regulator that actually knows what is going on and is willing to do something about it.
I want a regulator that is not politically-biased and does not allow BT to pull the wool over their eyes.
I'm glad I didn't waste my time writing up a multi-page summary for you and decided to just provide one example. So why is it good to have a private company making a profit out of say our water? Should we have multiple the number of say water pipes under the road multiple-fold to allow consumers to chose which water company to chose from? That would be the only way to have genuine competition and it would be crazy. And anything you write here is broadly wasting your time so consider it recreation and if you don't like it don't do it !
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iRobot
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Post by iRobot on Mar 19, 2021 19:39:00 GMT
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michaelc
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Post by michaelc on Mar 19, 2021 21:01:08 GMT
So why is it good to have a private company making a profit out of say our water? Should we have multiple the number of say water pipes under the road multiple-fold to allow consumers to chose which water company to chose from? That would be the only way to have genuine competition and it would be crazy. And anything you write here is broadly wasting your time so consider it recreation and if you don't like it don't do it !
Don't waste my time. You are behaving like bernythedolt at the moment, inventing fake arguments for the sake of being argumentative. Where's adrianc when I need him ?
Your analogy of water pipes is incorrect.
If you are seriously telling me that you cannot see anything wrong with the small example I outlined earlier, then you work for BT, Ofcom or the Conservative party.
It should be plain as day to anybody who reads it that the example I provided gives a clear demonstration of why there is a serious problem with the regulatory environment for telecoms in the UK.
There is NO TECHNICAL REASON why what I stated in my example should be happening. You analogy of pipes doesn't come into it either, its a completely misguided and false analogy.
Let me spell it out to you:
You move your phone number from BT to, say, Virgin
Your friend is a Vodafone customer and wants to call you. Virgin already have a direct connection to Vodafone Why the bloody hell should Virgin be forced to pay fees to BT for routing an inbound call via the BT network to a number that is held by a customer that decided to leave BT ? Because of the incompetent regulatory environment in the UK that enables BT to force it to be that way. That's why. It doesn't need to be that way. There is NO REASON other than the regulatory environment. Anywhere else on the planet the normal course of events would be for Vodafone to route directly to Virgin for any number that was ported to Virgin.
LOL. You need to calm down.
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