Tackling water poverty via a social tariff does not have to come at the expense of investment in the sector, the chief executive of the Consumer Council for Water (CCW) has argued.
Emma Clancy was speaking on the first day of the Utility Week Forum in London on Tuesday (8 November) during a session about how to ensure utilities are affordable.
Following an independent review into affordability of water on behalf of governments in England and Wales last year, CCW proposed that all customers should have access to a single social tariff to avoid the potential “postcode lottery” of support available to the 1.5 million households that cannot afford water and those just about managing to pay.
During her presentation, Clancy warned against making the issue a binary choice between investment and protecting the vulnerable.
She said: “In October major environmental and nature groups placed a letter in broadsheet papers suggesting that nature should not be pitted against growth, arguing that there were strong options to address both issues in harmony.
“And I would argue that pitting poverty against progress is also a false choice and that the introduction of a single social tariff in water would mean that we can make the investments that the sector needs to make and protect those who are struggling to pay their bills right now.
“It is only those that operate in a vacuum and are not responsible for achieving actual progress that assert binary choices and assume that we can do one thing without the other.”
Making the case for a social tariff in water, Clancy said that while the current system does deliver “significant benefit and is a credit to the water sector”, it is “not fit for purpose for today’s challenges or tomorrow’s”.
She further argued that a well-designed single social tariff would allow the sector to deliver on a commitment for water and sewage bills to be no more than 5% of disposable income by 2030.
She continued: “To carry on with the existing system creates reputational risk. And let’s face it, the water sector has had a bumpy time of it recently. The risk comes from the fact that the current arrangements are inefficient and also unfair.
“The scheme rules are decided in company boardrooms and that doesn’t feel right and means that support is vulnerable to external factors and individual company pressures and requirements.”
CCW has previously warned of a “postcode lottery” in terms of support. Clancy outlined how one family could receive a 90% reduction on their bill or no support at all, depending on where they live.
“Our review actually highlighted that people literally in the same road but on different sides of the street were getting different levels of support and clearly we don’t believe that’s tenable,” she added.