What is the surface water & highway drainage charge?
Site area charging is the name we give to how we calculate your charges for a service we call ‘surface water and highway drainage’ (see next section for an explanation). This is one element of your wastewater bill. In the past your rateable value, charging value (or a standing charge based upon your meter size) was used to calculate your surface water and highway drainage charges. However, as rateable values are affected by location, this meant that premises of a similar size were often charged different amounts which didn’t accurately reflect the cost of providing our services. The new method is directly linked to the footprint of properties connected to our system, as well as any other areas that drain water to the public sewer. We call this calculation method ‘site area charging’. To help our customers adjust to this new calculation method we phased this change in over a three year period, gradually reducing the rateable value calculation and replacing this with site area. This year
