THE ELECTRICITY Authority (EAC) billing system is confusing, problematic, and unfair to low- income groups, the House Trade Committee heard yesterday.
AKEL deputy Stavros Evagorou said pensioners were the hardest hit by the system since sometimes they had to pay a big chunk of their paltry pension on the electricity bill.
“They have problems surviving six months every year; this creates a serious social problem,” Evagorou said.
He added that some pensioners were asked to pay £90 or £100 on their electricity bills when their pension was just £140 a month.
The EAC currently applies the much-criticised estimated billing system where the actual electricity consumption is measured every four months.
In between, consumers receive an estimate, which can often be very high.
Any difference is adjusted two months later by the bill with the actual measurement.
The EAC argues that the current system is similar to those used all over Europe and reading the meters every four months saves both time and money.
But the committee yesterday censured the authority for its apparent unwillingness to hire around 15 employees at a cost of £150,000 a year that would solve the problem of overblown estimates with more frequent meter readings.
Evagorou said apart from creating problems to pensioners and low-income groups, the system threw off any effort to calculate a household budget. He added the EAC got to hold a substantial amount of short-term cash from VAT whose interest was very profitable for the authority.
Customs and Excise Department Director Zeta Emilianidou said the EAC submitted its VAT declaration 40 days after the end of a four-month period.
According to Evagorou, the EAC paid £15 million in VAT to the government for 2002.
From that he estimated the authority made around £500,000 from interest alone.
EAC Customer Services Director Costas Charalambous told the committee the authority understood the peoples’ concerns but increases in fuel prices, VAT and the readjustment of electricity bills gave people the impression over-billing was taking place and that this was wrong.
Charalambous said the EAC was looking into various ways of changing its system – one being a new scheme of fixed instalments based on annual consumption.
The EAC official revealed the authority was also looking into replacing all the meters with new ones that would enable direct measurement of the readings through computers.
He said the system was already in place at several large clients and in two weeks the EAC was planning to invite tenders for a pilot scheme involving households.
The scheme would run from six to nine months and next year the EAC will decide on whether to proceed with the investment, which is expected to cost around £40 million.
