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Hi All,
I received a court claims of £3,090.28 from Southern Waters few days back regarding an outstanding bills from July 2013 - Oct 2015. (I am no longer at the address from Oct 2015 due to separation with ex but served the notice at my new address).
We moved to the brand new property in 2004 and have been receiving regular bills. We were a family of 2 adults and 3 children in the house.
Along the lines, we have some outstanding water bills which we set up an installment payments of £100 monthly. We have been paying this regularly and discover that our bills always go up very high when the new bill arrive and the circle of installment payments continued. We didn't make much of this then as we thought the bill were normal to our usage (one bill for example was £748.87 for a quarter and another was £673.14 for 6 months).
Around 2013/14, we raised a complaint with Southern water (by phone) as to the amount of the high bills that we receive regularly. The agent agreed to suspend the account while she sent down an engineer down to inspect. When the engineer came, he discovered that there was a leak somewhere from the central supply to our property as the central meter outside kept reading even after we have close all taps and valves in our property. He promised to pass the message to the control and will arrange for major repairs from the main valve to our property. This repair never happen until I split with my partner in 2015.
From the latest 'breakdown of Account' sent along with the Small Claims, I noticed that Southern Water had cancelled and recalculated some of the bills from 06/2014 - 01/2015 (from £2891.88 to 516.70), after admitting to the leaks, and added this to the earlier outstanding amount but the amounts in the earlier months from 2013 backwards were untouched.
I would like to write a defense based on the above statement and below points:
I received a court claims of £3,090.28 from Southern Waters few days back regarding an outstanding bills from July 2013 - Oct 2015. (I am no longer at the address from Oct 2015 due to separation with ex but served the notice at my new address).
We moved to the brand new property in 2004 and have been receiving regular bills. We were a family of 2 adults and 3 children in the house.
Along the lines, we have some outstanding water bills which we set up an installment payments of £100 monthly. We have been paying this regularly and discover that our bills always go up very high when the new bill arrive and the circle of installment payments continued. We didn't make much of this then as we thought the bill were normal to our usage (one bill for example was £748.87 for a quarter and another was £673.14 for 6 months).
Around 2013/14, we raised a complaint with Southern water (by phone) as to the amount of the high bills that we receive regularly. The agent agreed to suspend the account while she sent down an engineer down to inspect. When the engineer came, he discovered that there was a leak somewhere from the central supply to our property as the central meter outside kept reading even after we have close all taps and valves in our property. He promised to pass the message to the control and will arrange for major repairs from the main valve to our property. This repair never happen until I split with my partner in 2015.
From the latest 'breakdown of Account' sent along with the Small Claims, I noticed that Southern Water had cancelled and recalculated some of the bills from 06/2014 - 01/2015 (from £2891.88 to 516.70), after admitting to the leaks, and added this to the earlier outstanding amount but the amounts in the earlier months from 2013 backwards were untouched.
I would like to write a defense based on the above statement and below points:
- that I don't think that I am owing them any monies because the earlier bills have been overcharged for many years, resulting in the outstanding bills.
- That the amount recalculated was for only 2014 and not the whole period of 2013 - 2015 that they were claiming for.
- I would also like to raise a counterclaim for the years that I suspect that they have probably be overcharging us (probably since we moved in to the brand new property).
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