Any subsequent allowances would be at the company’s discretion.”
This is conditional on the customer repairing the leak ‘within a reasonable period of time’. The Consumer Council for Water would like leak allowances to be more widely understood, especially as about a fifth of the overall water lost through leakage in England and Wales is on the customer side of the pipes.Īndy White, of CCW, said: “All water companies are required to give a leakage allowance to household customers on the first occasion of a leak on a metered supply. But for the 60pc of residential properties in England and Wales that have meters, it is something worth finding out about. I for one have never come across the term, probably because I am on an unmetered supply and so a leak would not impact my bill. You had never heard of such an allowance – and I suspect you are not alone. It also told me that it would be looking at how it communicated this policy with its customer support team as well as how it was presented in its customer support documents. Thames Water apologised for not explaining its leak allowance policy clearly enough when you queried the giant bill.
You expressed “heartfelt thanks” for my involvement. You were happy to pay the balance as this is similar to your usual annual charge. I am pleased to say, as a goodwill gesture, Thames Water quickly decided to refund £1,200 of the total £1,400 bill, reflecting the cost of the lost water. I felt Thames Water could have been more flexible as you had fixed the leak quickly – and were unaware of its allowance policy. It reminded you that its policy for covering the cost of leaks inside a house usually only applied if the repair was completed within three weeks of the problem being noticed and that a claim must be made within three months of it being fixed.Įven though you had checked your account online since the incident and noticed that your monthly bills were higher, it was not until you were reviewing your yearly payment plan – as you do every October – that you properly examined the statement and got the shock of your life. Thames Water then contacted you directly to discuss the matter. I got in touch with Thames Water immediately to see if it would reconsider its position and apply its leak allowance in retrospect – in other words refund the charges for the lost water.
The last thing you needed was an extra drain on your finances in the form of a surprise £1,400 water bill. You told me that you live with your partner in a block of flats that has been affected by the cladding crisis and that you already face the frightening prospect of £80,000 remediation charges. It seems terribly unfair that we now have this huge sum of money to pay back because of an arbitrary time limit on when a customer can benefit from Thames Water’s leak allowance. I pleaded with the representative that I had only just become aware of the billing problem but they stuck to their guns. However, Thames Water said I would have needed to phone them at the time of the leak and, now that it was too late, there was “nothing we can do”. When I phoned customer service about the bill, the team informed me of a “leak allowance” policy, which would allow the whole charge to be written off. That was around the time that we had a leaky toilet, which was losing water continuously until we could get a plumber around to fix it. Having logged into my water account I noticed that the firm has applied a charge of £1,400 for usage in August 2020. I recently noticed an enormous direct debit taken from our bank account by Thames Water and so contacted the company immediately.
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