Portugal's electricity supplier EDP has cut off the electricity to 285,000 households that failed to pay their bills, claiming that the number of disconnections for non-payment remained "stable" in the first nine months of last year compared to the same period in 2012, with only around 5% of EDP’s customers being disconnected.
"Electricity suppliers EDP, EDP Comercial and EDP Serviço Universal, have taken into account their customers’ circumstances “with the care the situation warrants and overall the situation has remained relatively stable," according to a company spokesman.
"Disconnection is a last resort which occurs only after a notice period of several weeks, and that in the overwhelming majority of cases, supply is soon reconnected" according to EDP which chose not to disclose the amount owed by its customers, stating only that between September 2012 and the same month in 2013, residential customers' debt increased 15%, while business customers experienced a "significant reduction" in debt levels.
Despite the poor getting poorer and the unemployment level remaining at over 15% the number of EDP’s residential customers entitled to the social tariff, which offers discounts to poorer households, managed to defy gravity and fall by 10,000 last year to just 60,000.
"A change of electricity supplier or the failure to fulfill the requirements to get the discounted tariff may be behind this drop," said the newly privatised company, unconvincingly.
Customers who are in a situation of ‘socio-economic deprivation,’ i.e. those that have little money, need to have their poverty confirmed by the Social Security system and have to be in receipt of one of five social security benefits and need to reconfirm their state of poverty each year.
In May this year the Energy Minister, Jorge Moreira da Silva, said in parliament that the government is working on new rules so that the country’s poorest 500,000 can take advantage of discounted electicity rates under the Social Tariff, news that will be welcomed by 440,000 account holders if and when it happens.
