The issue of bad debts is always a pertinent one for landlords around the country. And while the economy has been in recovery mode for the last year, utilities around the country are still left chasing bills that have gone unpaid for months.
A report on Utility Week raised the issue in 2012 and highlighted the landlord’s role as “the only credible option” to cut the levels of bad debts owed to utility companies by tenants.
A subsequent report from Inside Housing earlier this year revealed that “bad debts soared by almost 10 per cent among the top 100 housing associations last year”.
This is clearly not a problem that is going away. And it is a problem as much for the major utilities as it is for subcontractors like Lagan Water.
So what can be done about it? Landlords have been accused of washing their hands of their responsibility. There is a perception that so long as they are paid, nothing else matters. And to an extent that is true.
But are landlords ready or able to participate in another paper pushing exercise that predominently benefits huge utility companies at the expense of their time and money?
The answer seems obvious. There will continue to be scepticism unless a system is introduced that is exceptionally easy to use, fast and lightweight in terms of the time it would take to report a tenant’s details.
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