Water leak allowance

What this article can and cannot tell you[edit]

It can describe the shape of the thing. It cannot list any particular undertaker's terms, and that is a deliberate limitation rather than an omission.

Water companies and the consumer body do publish their allowance policies, but their pages serve their content through the browser rather than in the page source, so the policy text is not retrievable as evidence and cannot be cited here to the standard the rest of this site is held to. Quoting one company's terms from memory, or repeating a summary of them from a third party, would produce exactly the kind of confident and unverifiable statement this reference exists to avoid. **Check the policy with your own supplier**: it is the only reliable answer, and it is specific to them.

The shape of an allowance[edit]

Allowances share a general form across the industry, though every element of it varies. They are typically offered once, applied to the period during which the leak ran rather than indefinitely, conditional on the leak having been repaired within a stated time of being found, and restricted to leaks on the supply pipe rather than to internal plumbing or to waste through a fitting left running.

Several undertakers separately operate schemes offering a free or subsidised first repair on a customer's supply pipe. That is a different thing from an allowance — one reduces a bill, the other does the work — and a supplier may operate either, both or neither.

Why your neighbour's experience is not evidence[edit]

Because these are company policies rather than statutory entitlements, they differ between undertakers, and a supply boundary can run down a street. Two households a few doors apart can be served by different companies with materially different policies.

The fact that someone in the next county, or the next road, received an allowance therefore says nothing about whether another customer will. Nor does the existence of a scheme last year guarantee it this year: a charges scheme is remade, and discretion exercised one way once does not bind an undertaker to exercise it the same way again.^[2]

Liability is unaffected[edit]

An allowance reduces a charge. It does not move the boundary of responsibility: a leak on the supply pipe remains the property owner's to repair, because the supply pipe is the part of the service pipe not vested in the undertaker.^[3] Where water continues to be wasted, section 75 of the Water Industry Act 1991 gives undertakers powers to take steps to prevent waste.^[4]