People on a Bermondsey estate that has been blighted with heating and hot water outages for about nine months will now automatically be compensated under a new council policy.
Rouel Road estate residents have been suffering with problems from breakdowns in the communal district heating system since October 1 last year. Issues have included week-long outages for some, meaning people have frequently been reliant on expensive electric heaters, which are often supplied by Southwark Council. Residents canvassed by the News said problems have been less frequent in recent weeks.
Southwark Group of Tenants Organisation (SGTO), a charity that represents the interests of tenants and residents groups in the borough, said people on the Rouel Road estate had been waiting for compensation for months.
Under the new scheme any council tenants who have suffered heating or hot water outages for a 24-hour period will have £3 per day automatically added to their rent or service charge account. The payments will be sent every three months on a retrospective basis. Payments on the new scheme, which came into force in May, will be backdated to April, although outages on the Rouel Road estate have been a problem since October.
But SGTO warned that the fact that the payments are retrospective means council tenants could be left building up debt in the meantime with the electric heaters.
The new policy is the result of a review of the council’s complaints policy that began in 2019, six years after the previous review. A council spokesperson said that the Covid-19 pandemic had caused a delay in agreeing the new compensation scheme.
A spokesperson for pressure group Fuel Poverty Action said: “Southwark residents worked very hard, and mustered support from SGTO, Fuel Poverty Action, and wider afield, to devise a compensation policy that really will work for them. And they’ve been very patient, all through a pandemic when they really needed their heating, and people on estates like Rouel Road were freezing. Only to be rewarded with a policy that lmay be even worse for heat and hot water than it is for everything else. How are people supposed to top up their meters with compensation that comes in retrospectively three months after they need it? Or goes to pay off arrears on their rent account? And where is the compensation for repeated loss of heat and hot water for less than a full day, again and again?
“Will people compensated under the district heating clause be able to claim for distress and danger, eg carrying saucepans of water upstairs for a bath? Southwark broke ground in 2019 when they promised that “no one will be out of pocket” for district heating breakdowns. If only that were true!”
Rouel Road estate residents have been complaining of outages for months. Stories reported in the News include a pensioner sitting in his coat and dressing gown to keep warm in the “freezing” winter cold, and people racking up high bills from having electric heaters running constantly.