Playing with words, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis named the upcoming price hikes in water bills “readjustment.” Furthermore, he claimed that price hikes were essential due to water scarcity.
Mitsotakis spoke on Thursday of “adjustment to the level of inflation” adding that “no one is going to notice them.”
Of course, Greeks do not forget that when the news electricity tariffs were introduced, his ministers claimed on media that “the hikes would be a few cents and nobody would notice.” Six month later Greeks have learned their lesson seeing their actual increases being 20 to 100 euros per month.
“We are not going for increases in water,” Mitsotakis told Talk Radio on Thursday morning. “Water in Greece was and will remain cheap for reasonable consumption, we will not change the tariffs, the maximum is the adjustment to the level of inflation, no one is going to notice it on their bill,” he tried to sell the new mirrors to the indigenous people of the country.
However, a day earlier, at a press conferrer with Energy Minister Theodoros Skylakakis, the hikes were presented as measures in order to deal with the water shortage.
According to a Joint Ministerial Decision, different prices per region as well as a special tariff for the most vulnerable groups of the society will apply.
The JMD foresees:
Tariffs are determined by the provider and controlled by the FSA and cannot (as a general rule) increase more than the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices, while it is possible for the same provider to set different prices per region.
It is also possible to set different prices per region, the tiered charge according to consumption levels, with the obligation that the first level of consumption is affordable and covers the living needs of the population.
A special tariff for specific users, such as public social infrastructure, vulnerable households and families with many or three children, for the obligation to measure consumption 3 times a year.
- How these measures will help the country deal with the water scarcity is a mystery. There is no any limit to swimming pools, for example, but that’s tourism that brings revenues.
PS Slowly but gradually the water will also be privatized and “would be cheaper than when it belonged to the state as with the electricity because competition will bring down the prices” #NOT.
Power suppliers followed the good old tradition to form price cartels with the result that Greeks pay almost the highest prices in Europe, as KTG reported several times in the recent past.
I am a tourist myself but I just cant understand why people book seeside hotels and then demand a pool??!
Seewater is salty and much better for your skin than poolwater that is purifyed with chemicals to keep it clean. In my opinion you should fill all possible pools with seewater instead of sweetwater, that would save a lot of drinking water! You also need to put a stop to the big hotels that are planned with big “infinity”pools and large gardens that needs a lot of sweet water. Sweetwater is, nowadays, something valuable that has to be taken care of! And the climate change wont make it easier…..
A former Nestle CEO one said in an interview that people think that water is a basic human right but instead it is a commodity. That can be traded. Or somethimg in these words. Companies like Nestle and Coca Cola are buying up wells around the world so they can sell their poisonous sugar water.
People that think like that should be deprived access to water for a while and then ask what they think of it.
The primary condition for free market capitalism to work is that there must be a market. That is lots of willing sellers and lots of willing buyers. In the case of water there is a single water pipe entering your home coming from a single source of water. You cannot change to a different supplier – it is a monopoly.
The UK privatised its water industry many years ago, on the grounds that it would provide investment, and it has been a disaster. When the companies were taken over water was relatively cheap and the companies had no debt. Now water is much more expensive, the companies have taken on billions of pounds of debt and there has been very little investment. Shareholders have been paid billions of pounds in dividends. The cherry on the cake – UK rivers and coastal waters are so full of sewage that they are no longer safe to swim in.