State Duma prepares law cancelling raising coefficients for unmetered utility billing

UFA, 2 May 2017. /Bashinform News Agency, Olga Murtazina/. The State Duma prepares a law to cancel raising coefficients for utility payments, Izvestiya reports. The Housing Policy and Public Utilities Committee is preparing amendments to the law "On Energy Saving ..", which propose to abolish use of coefficients in case of meters absence, and to change a formula for calculating rates for an analogue method. The authors of the project believe that the currently used calculation method is inaccurate, and the rates are overstated. The analogue method means that the rate is based on consumption of the same housing with meters.

Now, according to the Ministry of Construction, 70 percent of housing is equipped with meters. The raising coefficient since July 1, 2016 is 1.5. As of January 1, 2017, the debt on housing and communal services payments was more than 1 trillion rubles, 40 percent of which was the debts of management companies to utility providers.