Are All Water Companies Not Fit For Purpose?

[organicguy]

Goweresque, can i just correct you on one thing....I've had 6 bursts on my 900mm pipe this summer alone.
Everything else, your spot on

Look on the bright side, they've started putting in the replacement!
And i bought a 360 out of my compensation, so not all bad. (I had 19 bursts in the 18 years of the pipe and the replacement didn't go on my land so I've got off lightly compared to @FG

 

[organicguy]

The good news is that I now have an ex SW employee who knows how the system works over compensation.

The bad news is that I had a call from my new "friend" at the call centre who is trying hard to help. He was delighted to tell me at 6.30pm that engineers were on site and fixing the leak.
By 9.30 engineers had abandoned the site and flooding is now worse.

I became so exasperated I e-mailed Thames water ceo direct, ( there is a website which gives e-mail addresses) Things move quicker for a while and I am convinced I stirred them up so much that is why my length of pipe was replaced before @FGs. I did have more bursts than him that year!

 

[Oliveau]

Me too!

Perhaps we could put our heads together and formulate a claim for the OP - pro bono of course, but it would be fun to excercise the old skills again. There’s no fool like an old fool……….!

 

[Oliveau]

The good news is that I now have an ex SW employee who knows how the system works over compensation.

The bad news is that I had a call from my new "friend" at the call centre who is trying hard to help. He was delighted to tell me at 6.30pm that engineers were on site and fixing the leak.
By 9.30 engineers had abandoned the site and flooding is now worse.

You are I trust taking lots of photographs showing the leak and the flooding on your land? It’s always very difficult to argue against good photographic evidence.
Also make diary notes of the time that you have spent dealing with this matter, cost of phone calls, vehicle mileage in travelling to the affected land. It’s all chargeable so long as you can substantiate it. Little things like “I had to pay my man overtime to do a job that I couldn’t do because I was busy on the phone trying to contact you lot.”

 

[Frank-the-Wool]

You are I trust taking lots of photographs showing the leak and the flooding on your land? It’s always very difficult to argue against good photographic evidence.
Also make diary notes of the time that you have spent dealing with this matter, cost of phone calls, vehicle mileage in travelling to the affected land. It’s all chargeable so long as you can substantiate it. Little things like “I had to pay my man overtime to do a job that I couldn’t do because I was busy on the phone trying to contact you lot.”

Oh yes and I now do a daily blog with times and names of people I speak to!!!

 

[Farfrae]

Oh how I love posts like these when people tell me how inefficient the public sector is compared to the lean, mean and keen private sector so beloved by the Tory faithful ;-)

 

[Two Tone]

When Waterplus took over from Severn Trent, they conveniently forgot to give us our Non Return to Sewer discount that was agreed with STW. They claim that it is a different organisation and that that don’t need to honour it. I Googled Waterplus and he 1st thing it says is that it is a joint venture between STW and United Utilities.
We haven’t paid WaterPlus anything now for over 3 years.
They have tried 3 different debt collectors, some of them twice, but they cannot get us to pay as they realise we have a legitimate case.
So every time we just get put at the bottom of the pile.
Useless tw@ts!

 

[Oliveau]

When Waterplus took over from Severn Trent, they conveniently forgot to give us our Non Return to Sewer discount that was agreed with STW. They claim that it is a different organisation and that that don’t need to honour it. I Googled Waterplus and he 1st thing it says is that it is a joint venture between STW and United Utilities.
We haven’t paid WaterPlus anything now for over 3 years.
They have tried 3 different debt collectors, some of them twice, but they cannot get us to pay as they realise we have a legitimate case.
So every time we just get put at the bottom of the pile.
Useless twits!

An industry problem!
Be it Accounts or 'Customer Services' - All staffed by people who have no idea what the Company does, where it operates or who the relevant managers are. In my day, increasingly, CS had no idea of the geography of anything more than 10 miles from Exeter, so someone reporting a problem in deepest rural Cornwall might as well have been talking to the man in the moon.
Again, in my day if the OP's agent had contacted me, I would have just gone round to the Area Distribution Manager's office and had a chat with him or one of his capable staff, and a contractor's team would have been on their way very quickly. Old fashioned person to person contact, rather than e-mails that busy people don't have time to read. But then I'm a dinosaur...........

 

[JMM]

When Waterplus took over from Severn Trent, they conveniently forgot to give us our Non Return to Sewer discount that was agreed with STW. They claim that it is a different organisation and that that don’t need to honour it. I Googled Waterplus and he 1st thing it says is that it is a joint venture between STW and United Utilities.
We haven’t paid WaterPlus anything now for over 3 years.
They have tried 3 different debt collectors, some of them twice, but they cannot get us to pay as they realise we have a legitimate case.
So every time we just get put at the bottom of the pile.
Useless tw@ts!

Same here, but with Castle Water, also the stupid feckers had been reading a redundant meter which was left in situ by Thames Water when they replaced the main stop valve, they then found the actual meter and tried to charge me £3,500 for a 6 month period, bearing in mind I have no livestock at the home farm save for Mothers hay burner and there's only two cottages, three taps in the buildings and the spray fill tank at that site.

 

[Frank-the-Wool]

Finally the burst was fixed yesterday, Tuesday 21st so it took 10 days from the time it was first reported.

The traffic lights remained for some hours after it was fixed and the "guard" from London slept in his car until they took them away.
The inefficiency and the costs racked up by these companies is mind boggling.

 

[Two Tone]

Same here, but with Castle Water, also the stupid feckers had been reading a redundant meter which was left in situ by Thames Water when they replaced the main stop valve, they then found the actual meter and tried to charge me £3,500 for a 6 month period, bearing in mind I have no livestock at the home farm save for Mothers hay burner and there's only two cottages, three taps in the buildings and the spray fill tank at that site.

Best thing to do in any of these situations is to simply STOP paying them, explain why and wait for them to sort it out, which will take years. It is easy enough to calculate what is actually owed to them and keep that value aside in your annual accounts.

It took STW 2 years to sort out our original Non Return to Sewer (NRTS) discount, being 85%. We then forced them to backdate it 6 years under the Statute of Limitations. Fortunately I still have everything on record and as Waterplus are joint owned by STW and United Utilities, they are certainly between a rock and a hard place.
They cannot Post-factum renege on a formal agreement
When (not if!) they agree to reinstate our NRTS discount, they will have to do the same with everybody else in the same situation. So by not dealing with our issue, it prevents them from having to do so with all the others.
That is their problem not ours. But I suspect it will eventually end up in Court, then they will be well and truly scuppered. We shall also be claiming our time and stress dealing with the issue, when they lose.

When our Waterplus bills took over from STW, it took me a year before I realised what was going on. So we had already paid a year’s worth of full NRTS charges.
I then pointed this out to them, to which they said “Tough, we are not STW”.
I pointed out to them that they are indeed part of STW as shown on Google.
I then told them that we will not pay anything more until they sorted it out. This was 3 & 1/2 years ago.
Then they sent me a NRTS claim form which I filled in and sent back to them. It showed that our discount should now be over 90%, due to less people living in this house, it being the only building connected to the Sewer, all the farming buildings down hill and not being connected to it.
Their response was that that they had incorrectly sent me that claim form as it was only for former United Utilities customers and not valid for us!
Then they started down the Debt recovery service route. We explained our case and the Debt recovery organisation dropped our case.
This happened again the following year and again the one after that with different Debt recovery agencies.
Now the 1st one is trying again, Claiming we owe over £20k, including interest and recovery fees!
We know we only owe them £6.5k, less our time and expenses in dealing with it all.
The cheeky beggars are asking us to make an offer, but I’m not falling for that, because I won’t permanently solve the NRTS issue.

I just cannot understand the stupidity of Waterplus for allowing this situation to go on-and-on. Other than by not dealing with the issue, they will continue to cheat other customers in a similar situation!

 

[Oliveau]

Finally the burst was fixed yesterday, Tuesday 21st so it took 10 days from the time it was first reported.

The traffic lights remained for some hours after it was fixed and the "guard" from London slept in his car until they took them away.
The inefficiency and the costs racked up by these companies is mind boggling.

At last! But keep us posted on the upcoming compensation battle please.

 

[Frank-the-Wool]

At last! But keep us posted on the upcoming compensation battle please.

Will do!