About this project
While GVW has close to the lowest bills, not only in Victoria but also in Australia, we recognise the desire of our customers to receive the best value for money possible.
We spoke to hundreds of our customers during our Price Submission engagement activities over several months in 2016-17, and we heard that pricing was an important issue of concern. We looked at ways we could improve this, and as part of our submission to the Essential Services Commission, we committed to reducing prices for service and volumetric charges for customers in the next five years.
Actions to date
We included a real price reduction of 2% per year on water and sewerage services in our Price Plan 2018-23, which came into effect on 1 July 2018 - the decrease was automatically calculated into bills. We’ve delivered lower bill costs for the fourth year in a row, meaning our bills are some of the cheapest in Victoria - and in Australia. We’ve achieved the lower prices thanks to a range of cost-reduction measures, risk management and revenue enhancement activities.
What's next?
We’ll continue to engage with customers about water bill pricing and collate their feedback. We’ve captured additional feedback as part of our Think Beyond Water engagement process for our upcoming pricing submission (2023-28), which identified that prices and value for money services remained a key priority for customers going forward. We’ll look at that feedback as we develop our next five-year plan. We’ll also continue to identify potential cost saving measures and revenue enhancements across the business to continue delivering the best prices for our customers.
Our accountability for this project
The Essential Services Commission has approved pricing for the period 2018-23, therefore prices will remain at the current rate until the end of the price period.
For this information in PDF form, click here to download the factsheet (PDF: 422KB)