Decision Report 201406714

Summary

Mrs C raised a complaint about Business Stream's handling of charges for water and drainage services. In particular, she was unhappy about the delay in issuing an invoice for these charges which Business Stream had backdated to 2008. She also complained that Business Stream had failed to fully investigate other possible service users who were sharing her water meter.

During our investigation we found no evidence that Business Stream had been notified prior to 2011 that Mrs C had moved into the premises and that they had failed to act on this information. However, we were concerned that once Business Stream were notified in October 2011 it then took until December 2012 for an account to be opened. Business Stream also accepted that they had failed to carry out two meter readings as required. As a result, Business Stream amended the opening of the account to October 2011 and applied an ex gratia payment amounting to 50 percent of the total water consumption as a gesture of goodwill. We upheld this aspect of Mrs C's complaint.

We were satisfied that Business Stream had carried out reasonable enquiries to establish that Mrs C was not on a shared supply and that her meter only served her property. Therefore we did not uphold this aspect of Mrs C's complaint.

Recommendations

We recommended that Business Stream:

• apologise to Mrs C for their handling of this matter.