Light And Water Tariffs Up

The Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has announced a 7% increase in electricity tarrifs.

At a press conference in Accra today Monday August 29, 2011, the Commission also announced a 6.7% increase in water tariffs, effective September 1 to November 30, 2011.

Utility providers can now heave a sigh of relief with the announcements although their expectation of a minimum of 20 % was not given them.

The new tariffs, 7 percent for electricity and 6.72 percent for water is as a result of an improvement in the quality of services.

In the first quarter of 2011, the PURC announced a reduction in utility tariffs, the first time ever since the inception of the PURC.

In the second quarter, the commission did not announce an increment due to the poor quality of service by the utility companies.

In an interview with Citi News, Executive Secretary of the PURC Steven Adu indicated that the increment was necessary because help the providers accrue some revenue to help them better the services they provide to consumers.

He noted that �looking at the analyses that we did last quarter, it pointed to some increase but we decided as a commission we could not go to tell the public that the prices are going up when we know that the quality of service generally was very bad.

�This time around, the same movement is there but we also do not want them to accumulate too much deficit so we have decided that because we have done a lot of monitoring and we know that there has been some improvement this quarter, we can give them a marginal increment.

�Any increase is an increase and it is not palatable but you know that it is not excessive and it gives us an opportunity to hold them further to the quality of service that they should adhere to�.

This brings to an end the several weeks of speculation about the hikes in the utility tariffs.

Details soon�

Source: Citifmonline.com