Low-income earners living in rental properties could be facing rent rises if the ACT's landlords pass on a potential $500 hike in annual water supply charges.
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And apartment owners in Canberra will also likely be hit with the rise in water charges if the Independent Competition and Regulatory Commission finalises the potential changes in a tariff review underway that will set prices from June 2018.
ACT Council of Social Service director Susan Helyar said she met with Icon Water last week about a range of issues, including her "biggest priority": ensuring the ACT's lowest-paid people were protected from any hike in water charges.
"There is a risk that the water costs, which are paid by landlords, could be passed on to tenants through an increase in rents," Ms Helyar said.
"The difficulty is that as they don't directly pay the water fees, low income renters won't be able to directly engage with Icon if rents go up as a result of an increase."
Ms Helyar said the council also wanted an "understanding" to be included in the tariff review underway to ensure "the distributional impacts of those changes are taken into account".
"We also need to consider non-tariff ways to help protect low income earners from the price rise, whether that be looking at concessional programs or potential changes to the hardship processes," she said.
Ms Helyar said the council would be getting involved formally with the tariff review and she wanted to see more "fine-grained analysis" of the potential impacts on residents.
President of the ACT's Owners Corporation Network Gary Petherbridge said he would also like to know more about how people in strata complexes would be treated.
He said if the current system did not change, all apartment owners - who each pay the annual supply charge, but share the costs of the per kilolitre water usage charge - would be facing an extra $500 or more under initial ICRC calculations.
"Because everyone has to pay the supply charge, apartment dwellers in the ACT are all going to be severely disadvantaged by any increase in that charge," he said.
"It means for every block of say 200 apartments, the ACT government is basically getting 200 times the supply charge, even though there's only one water meter at most apartment blocks."
The tariff review follows Icon Water posting an expected $30 million boost to its revenue over the three years from 2017-18 to 2019-2020 in the ACT's June budget - rising from about $74 million in 2017-18 to $104 million in 2019-20.
An Icon Water spokeswoman said that rise was due to an assumption of a 4.5% real increase in the average residential customer's bill in 2018-19, based on forecasts showing a potential increase in water consumption over the period.
That equated to about an extra $1 per resident that year, but those assumptions did not include a further increase in 2019-20.
The Icon Water spokeswoman said while the utility undertook the forecasts, it was "too early to determine" the actual price of water and sewerage services in the next regulatory period, which is the subject of the ICRC review currently underway.
