Landlords to provide tenant details to water companies

Posted in 'Credit Reports' by Barry Stamp

09 January 2012

Water companies are planning to set up a website that will enable landlords to provide information about their tenants that can then be passed on to the relevant water supplier. This will enable water companies to set up bills more accurately and more quickly.

The motive is to reduce bad debt which arises from tenants frequently changing premises, resulting in water bills being left unpaid. It is estimated that the bad debt arising from these tenants adds an extra £15 a year to the bills of every water customer.

Water bills currently do not appear on credit reports because everyone has a statutory right to water and no formal contract is required. A contract would be needed to include the consent clause required for water companies to report to the credit reference agencies how their customers are paying their water bills. Landlords, on the other hand, can obtain consent to disclose the personal details of tenants to the utility companies with their tenancy agreements.

The payment history of water bills does not currently appear on credit reports, although for some time many utilities have been looking at ways of providing this to the credit reference agencies. Amongst other thing, this would give them access to the address tracing tools provided by the credit reference agencies that make use of shared payment information.

To see what information is currently provided to the credit reference agencies, and which already goes beyond credit providers, we suggest you check your Multi Agency Credit Report if you haven’t already done so. It’s free to trial for 30 days, and then costs £9.99 a month until you cancel, which you can do at any time.Our credit reports contain more than twice the information than can be found on any other online credit report, and also include credit scores free.