Human rights activists demand that bills be automatically adjusted and done free of charge for consumers
The Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation may revise the system for recalculating the cost of housing and communal services if they turned out to be of poor quality or were not provided at all. With a corresponding letter to the construction department, public and human rights organizations. This may be especially relevant when paying for water supply or heating, which are often temporarily turned off in different regions of the country due to severe wear and tear of the equipment. How the system needs to be reformed so that Russians do not overpay for housing and communal services, MK was told by one of the authors of the appeal, a specialist at the International Confederation of Consumer Societies (ConfOP), lawyer Diana Sork.
< p>— As a ConfOP survey showed, almost a third of Russians (28.5%) noticed a deterioration in the quality of housing and communal services over the past year. We believe that this is a natural result of the fact that previously there was federal supervision in the housing and communal services sector, but now everything has moved to the local level, which has a negative impact on the quality of services provided. Everyone remembers how this year in winter people in various regions, including the Moscow region, found themselves without heating for several days. The level of wear and tear on municipal equipment in Russia is very high; there are areas, for example, water supply, where this figure reaches 50%. It is safe to predict that if nothing changes, the number of utility accidents will increase. Meanwhile, Russians pay for services in full, regardless of whether they were provided to consumers and what their quality was. The quality of public services is most often controlled by services subordinate to local authorities, which, in turn, establish these companies. A conflict of interest arises. In this system, consumers most often receive simply unsubscribes in response to their complaints.
— We approached the Ministry of Construction with an initiative to organize a system for automatically recalculating the cost of utility services for Russians if these services turned out to be of inadequate quality or were not provided at all.
— Theoretically and legally, it is possible to achieve a recalculation now, but for this the consumer needs to take so many steps that de facto no citizen applies for a recalculation. The main problem at present is the need for the victim to independently apply for recalculation of the cost of housing and communal services. Few people do this, because if such an application is filed, the management company always has the option of saying that it does not agree with the consumer and sending it to court. Then the person will be forced to incur quite high expenses in order to prove his case and obtain a recalculation through the court. Previously, a claim could be filed collectively, from a specific organization, for example, from a local consumer society, or claims were brought by territorial branches of Rospotrebnadzor, but these were isolated stories.
However, even after the completion of court proceedings on such applications, the consumer needed to in a separate manner, once again go to court to obtain its decision on a specific recalculation of utilities. The current mechanism of claims in defense of an indefinite number of persons does not allow immediate compensation for victims of poor-quality public services.
— Each citizen who owns property is paid a certain amount per month “for communal services.” It just needs to be divided by the number of days or hours, depending on the selected recalculation mechanism. Suppose there is an accident and there is no heating in the house for two days. Then the cost of these two days is automatically deducted from the monthly bill for housing and communal services.
We believe that a person should not do anything to pay less. Information about the accident and the cost of housing and communal services should be available to consumers, so that people can see how much less they have to pay and can double-check whether everything was calculated for them correctly. But the networks with the management organization must then figure out themselves who is to blame for the accident and at whose expense the price of services will be reduced. The consumer should not suffer.
— All we need is political will. And we plan to ensure that it is demonstrated by the authorities. We want consumers who suffer from poor-quality provision of housing and communal services to have the right to an adequate reduction in payments and this happens automatically.