Watery muddle

A water bill arrived today which told me that I had nothing to pay. Which annoyed me, because clearly I do pay Thames water for supply of clean water and the removal of dirty water. There is a direct debit mandate to prove it.

First stop was my bank statements, which I only keep for a year, on which I could find no trace of Thames Water.

Second stop was my file of bills. Thames Water was to be found here, but nothing about what I had been paying them, if anything. But there was talk of a payment holiday.

Third stop was my online account, which turned out not to exist, although creating one was not particularly difficult. My only complaint was that it did not like the password I first thought to use.

But when I got into my account, there was neither payment nor transaction history, and I was reduced to checking by download all the half yearly statements. They were reasonably complicated, and as far as I can make out, I last paid them money, £92 a month to be precise, back in January 2022.

I can only suppose that Thames Water have difficulty guessing how much water we are going to use, despite our being regular and undemanding customers for thirty years or more, with no tendency to start pouring water into garden ponds, hot tubs or anything else. Just bog standard domestic use. So much difficulty that I ran up enough credit with them for them not to need to take any money off me for well over a year. To be fair, I think some of the other utilities are just as bad.

Furthermore, I suspect that the pendulum is about to swing the other way, with my balance with them not being nearly enough to meet the next bill. It seems all too likely that this will result in my direct debit being set rather too high in the not too distant future.

The bottom line seems to be that Thames Water are as bad at managing customer accounts as they are at managing leaks. What they are good at is sucking money out of the system to pay their shareholders. Or at least they were until recently. To be fair, I have also read that we have been paying them rather less than is fair if we want them to keep the infrastructure in good working order: shareholders are not the only ones to have been doing OK. To which I would add that, if we sell off a chunk of the country's infrastructure for ready cash, we can't really complain if the buyer wants to recoup his outlay. The buyer has, in effect, bought an annuity off the consumer. Jam today and to hell with tomorrow.

The other annoyance of the day has been the overturning of a conviction for a serious rape committed some twenty years ago. The Guardian tells us that there has been a serious miscarriage of justice and of various failings in the criminal justice system, but tells us nothing of what it was that lead the police to believe that the man they put in jail for getting on for twenty years was guilty in the first place or of any failings in his defence which may have contributed to the jury believing them. Perhaps this is not the time for balance, perhaps comment is out of order until the appeal court finishes its business. Perhaps we will have to wait for some blockbuster report from some retired judge in ten year's time. But it is all rather unsatisfactory - and our track record in matters of this sort is not such that one is content to just let the powers that be get on with it.