By Isle of Wight Observer
Dear Editor,
I thought your readers should see a part of my letter to Southern Water. I would advise them to check their own bills.
“I was utterly shocked on receiving my bill for 2025–26 to note that you are putting my direct debit payments up from £28.50 to £48.90 per month, a massive 71.6 per cent increase despite the fact that I ended the year with a £50.90 credit balance with you.
Whilst I understood that prices were going to increase substantially above inflation over the next five or six years to enable you to continue paying telephone number salaries to your senior executives and healthy dividends to your shareholders (with perhaps some money left over to deal with the sewerage into rivers and sea scandal), I did not expect you to be inflicting this on your long-suffering customers in one year.
According to my bill the water charge has increased from £1.958 to £2.753 per cubic metre on April 1, 2025 and from £2.461 to £3.794 for wastewater from the same date. This by my calculation amounts to increases of 40.6 and 54.2 per cent respectively.
Whilst these increases themselves are many times the rate of inflation, they are far less than the increase you have taken it upon yourselves to increase my direct debit payment without consulting me.
I also note that you have increased my charges from April 1, but you did not take a meter reading until 25th April 2025 and therefore cannot know how much water we used over the preceding three and a half weeks. Over that period we did in fact spend quite a bit of time away from the property when we did not use any water at all. I would submit therefore that the higher charge should not have been applied until after the meter reading was taken.”
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