Energy bills: students should beware surprise charges
Liz Truss may have promised to freeze energy bills at an average of £2,500 a year but many students – or their parents – could still be hit with surprise extra bills for going over their limits.
If you, or your offspring, are privately renting student accommodation with bills included, read the small print very carefully, and if in any doubt, ask, as it might not be quite as good a deal as it seems. Many students will be unaware that in most agreements with student letting agents, the energy included is typically subject to a fair use policy – a cap or allowance – that is often based not on units of energy consumed but on sums of money spent.
For example, it might be that with a shared house each student is allocated, say, £350 for gas and electricity for the year, with anything extra going on the tenants’ account.
These sums, which may have seemed generous in the past, are being rapidly eclipsed by the rising price of gas and electricity.
Many agents that supply student housing publish their fair usage policies online, although you need to check if recent events mean the allowance has got better or worse. Examples we found included a maximum amount of £3,600 for a household of nine tenants in Manchester, and an agent covering Birmingham, Nottingham and Bristol that had a fair use policy of just shy of £1,800 for three tenants. The £350 allowance for each person highlighted earlier was a letting agent in Liverpool.
The government’s £2,500 figure for the bill freeze is based on a “typical” household on a dual-fuel deal with “median consumption”. For bigger properties and households that use lots of energy, it could be (a lot) more.
Students, who are often cooking, running the washing machine or heating their rooms separately,
Read more on theguardian.com
