Housing and communal services opposed the transfer of interest on utility bills from citizens to companies

Associations of housing and communal services enterprises sent a letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin with a request to limit the planned ban on charging citizens commissions when paying for utility bills to preferential categories or payments only through banks. The industry also asks not to shift the commission to resource supply organizations (RSOs). Market participants talk about the risks of increasing non-payments, increasing tariffs or reducing investment programs. However, the version of the bill recommended for the second reading does not provide for such restrictions.

Participants in the housing and communal services market have joined the discussion that has unfolded over the past few weeks around a bill introducing a ban on charging citizens commissions when paying for utility services through banks, paying agents, subagents and postal operators. Thus, a number of industry associations, including the Russian Association of Water Supply and Sanitation, the Council of Energy Producers, and the Russian Gas Society, sent a collective letter to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. The White House did not comment on it.

The bill on the abolition of commissions when paying for housing and communal services was submitted to the State Duma in February 2020 and passed the first reading in April, but since then has remained without movement. In May 2020, the relevant committee recommended for approval amendments that would prohibit the collection of fees only for pensioners and recipients of subsidies for housing and communal services (assumed if the payment for utilities is 22% higher than the total income; about 2 million people receive them) , but later a new version of the amendments appeared – without such restrictions. In November of this year, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin instructed deputies to consider the project by the end of the year so that the commissions would be abolished in 2024. Banks have already expressed their concerns against this background, proposing to collect commissions from RSOs instead of citizens, as well as management companies and homeowners’ associations (see Kommersant on November 30).

Associations in the housing and communal services sector remind that since 2019 there has been a ban on taking into account consumer expenses for payment services in utility tariffs. The transfer of the commission to housing and communal services organizations will lead to additional industry expenses on payment services of more than 50 billion rubles – this, as noted in the appeal, is one and a half times more than the subsidies of the Territorial Development Fund to the regions for the modernization of housing and communal services in 2023 (30 billion rubles). In this case, the authors of the letter warn, it will be necessary to increase the maximum payment indices for citizens for housing and communal services or, taking into account the policy of limiting its growth, to reduce the investment programs of the North Ossetia, which “is unacceptable in the context of the ever-growing need for modernization.” Let us remind you that in the Russian Federation about 40% of networks need updating; the underfunding of the industry is estimated at 4.6 trillion rubles.

Other concerns include an increase in non-payments by citizens (their debt already amounts to 876 billion rubles), which will require spending to cover new cash gaps, and a decrease in the investment attractiveness of the housing and communal services sector (the share of unprofitable enterprises in the industry at the end of 2022 is 45.7%). To mitigate these risks, market participants propose banning commissions either on payments from citizens receiving subsidies or on payments only through banks. In any case, the authors of the letter insist, there should be a ban on “shifting” commissions to housing and communal services organizations.

As Svetlana Razvorotneva, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Construction and Housing and Communal Services, told Kommersant, yesterday the committee approved the amendments, and next week the bill will be considered in the second reading. The current version, according to her, provides for a ban on charging commissions for payments for housing and communal services for all individuals without exception. “We discussed the possibility of prohibiting the transfer of commissions to the RSO, but in the end they came to the conclusion that it was impossible to prohibit this, since we are talking about contractual relations between two legal entities,” she says, clarifying that “this will not be as critical as in the case of citizens “RSOs can choose which banks to work with and create their own settlement centers.”

Evgenia Kryuchkova