To do this, the capital will have to change its status
The government of Russia proposes to give the city authorities the right to set the specifics for determining the amount of heating fees. To do this, on Wednesday, April 19, it submitted to the State Duma a bill on amendments to the Housing Code and the Law «On the Status of the Capital of the Russian Federation».
As it became known to «MK», the draft law was prepared in order to prevent a significant increase in fees for housing and communal services, which is associated with annual climatic fluctuations. Currently, Russian legislation allows two payment schemes for consumed heat: in some regions they pay only during the heating period, in others — during the calendar year. In accordance with the second scheme, the payment for heating is calculated based on the volume of heat energy consumption for heating an apartment building for the previous year. Thus, citizens pay monthly 1/12 of the amount they paid in general for the last year.
In Moscow, the second scheme was chosen. But due to the peculiarities of the metropolitan climate, this leads to some distortions. The authors of the document give a recent example: due to the fact that the winter of 2020 was extremely warm and the winter of 2021 was quite cold, the monthly heating bill, which, according to this scheme, was due to be billed in 2022, was in an average of 25% more than a year earlier. In some houses this growth exceeded 50%. A solution to this problem is to charge the payment not at the end of the year, but at the end of two or more previous years. This would make it possible to equalize the increase in heat charges. But Moscow can switch to this or another convenient payment procedure only with a change in legislation.
the new rules apply to legal relations that arose from January 1, 2022. The authors of the document explain this by the need to smooth out social tensions.