New charge to pay water bills

Following up on yesterday's story that United Utilities proposed price rises are even higher than they first seem, the water company has also slipped in last month a hefty new charge for paying your water bill at the post office.

Audlem Online was told that a number of local residents had expressed anger and astonishment at the charge, particularly as they had paid their bills over the Audlem Post Office counter for years. This we are told is an important part of the local post office's business which is also very convenient for many people.

Finding it hard to comprehend that a public utility could be so unthinking as to charge for customers paying them, a webteam member who had a water bill to pay, visited the post office. The charge, which has nothing to do with the Post Office company, and is entirely a United Utilities charge, was a whopping £2.35. Curiously, the UU bill only says: "From 1 July you will need to pay a fee". Perhaps they couldn't quite bring themselves to print the actual fee!

It seems that UU has decided to join the list of organisations such as the TV licensing people who are doing their best to sink a vital service for many people by making it either impossible or ludicrously expensive to pay for their 'services' at the post office.

In the case of UU, it is doubtless an attempt to obtain payment by Direct Debit. This way they can 'frontload' the charges over the year to improve their cash flow in just the same way as they plan to increase their charges dramatically in the early years of their five year plan for price rises above inflation, as detailed in yesterday's story.

Perhaps a large number of letters complaining about this new charge may help United Utilities to see sense and withdraw it.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.