Laws regarding garden/lawn watering

"I would have expected this company to claim for everything"

Indeed, but I'm not sure it works like that.

If I buy a new computer for my business I cannot claim it against the current year, my understanding (probably shaky!) is that I buy the computer and then claim it as a capital allowance over, say, 4 years. So I get a quarter of the value in the first year, a quarter of the remaining value in the second year, and so on.

That's still a significant right-down in each year, and its "before profit" in the accounts. I'm inclined to thing that buying a replacement pipe, or repairing a leak, ought to be higher up the tree, in terms of being able to claim the cost before-profits. Hopefully someone more "accountant inclined" can clarify?

 

Just hunted the bill out - £180.92 for the year ...... so half of yours ! Payable in two instalments of £90 each.

So £15.07 per month if you work it out monthly - which for the amount we use is way cheaper than paying on a meter!

 

Thats with Severn Trent Water

 

At work, we specialise in 'company lets' whereby the company like us to include all the utility bills in with the price of the rent so they only have to pay one set charge monthly. We do this for a high majority of our properties.

Where we have fixed rates for water the 'inclusive' price is always cheaper because obviously we know exactly how much the water bills are going to be. They are always higher on all our properties that have water meters.

We have two bed apartments (with sometimes only one permitted occupier) that have higher water bills than some of our executive 4/5 bedroom houses that have complete families in, on a fixed rate bill. After sorting bills out for these properties for the last 13 years - the difference can be shocking!

We have never requested any of our properties change to have a meter and the only ones that do have them are all the new build properties the company brought a few years ago. If we could have them changed to a fixed bill then we would. For every single property!

In the past we have had water leaks underground that have took months to sort out and although Severn Trent do then discount your bills - we still think that we ended up paying for most of the water that had leaked away!

In some our of new build apartments - we have also paid for other apartments meters when the builders labelled the meters up wrongly!!

I know that at some point the water companies are going to change every household to meters. Why would they go to the expense of all that if they weren't going to make even more money ??? I cant remember where I read it now, but a whole council estate 'up north' somewhere had water meters installed and people had stopped flushing toilets after every use to save money. How bad is that ????

 

Using a couple of gallons of perfectly good drinking water to flush away half a pint of pee is pretty wasteful in itself so flushing less often is quite a good thing.. environmentally speaking :wink:

 

I've been self employed for 22 years, we do deprecation for capital assets, however when I wrote "I would have expected this company to claim for everything" I don't beleive they will have missed a trick. They will have spent huge amounts, even millions with the best tax advisors to find every way possible including loop holes to declare as small amount of profit as possible and pay as little tax as possible, something most small business just can not afford to do.

I was thinking about this discussion today while parking on the M25, :D what really irks me about this whole topic is that water is a given necessity, none of us can live with out it, so it seems wrong that it can be controlled by a single company who can charge (within reason) what they like. I think making a vast profit when you effectively have a monopoly is wrong. If they were operating in a market place like the rest of us they would be forced in to competition which would inevitably lead to better value for customers.

 

I think the general rule of thumb is:

if you have equal or more bedrooms in your house than people living there, a meter will GENERALLY work out cheaper, if there are more people than bedrooms, stick to the rates.

Personally, a meter is cheaper for us, 2 in a 3 bed house, this may change if we are blessed with rug rats in the future!!

 

"so it seems wrong that it can be controlled by a single company who can charge (within reason) what they like"

I agree, there ought to be competition to supply each household with Water, so the consumer has a choice - like electricity. That probably means that the "infrastructure" of pipes would have to be run separately - the Government could tender for the maintenance of that to drive the cost down.

 

Or why not just re-nationalise the water boards? It's a commodity no one can do without yet private companies can charge what they like, with vast differences it seems depending on where you live.

 

Would agree Aaron - our water seems very cheap compared to everyone elses ! But then we arent that far away from the 'water works' or whatever its called so maybe that makes it cheaper, not sure.

 

You can have a meter fitted and if more expensive ask to be switched back to rateable value within the first year.

Also if you have certain medical conditions requiring high water usage and receive benefits you can get a special tarriff to reduce costs

Neil