Duwo tenants still awaiting the final settlement of 2022 (and 2023) service costs

Technical problems and the extra work that the energy crisis entailed have caused delays in calculating the service costs that include energy and caretaking costs.

This is causing frustration among residents. One of them is TU Delft student Jonathan (last name known to editors). “Last year was tense given the rising energy prices. I really want to know where I stand. I want to know if I will get any money back or if I need to pay extra.”

A Duwo spokesperson answered in writing that they could not give a definite answer at the moment. ‘We are striving to have the last calculations done by 31 March, but we cannot guarantee this. We understand that the residents who have not yet received their final bill have had to wait for a very long time. We are very sorry for this.’

Energy crisis

The delay was caused by a piling up of circumstances, explains Duwo. A lot of extra work was created by unforeseen technical problems when inputting data into a new computer system. ‘Data that had always been registered automatically, such as the meter readings from different housing complexes, now had to be input by hand.’

Duwo’s efforts to reduce the energy costs for tenants also took time. The housing provider convinced the Government to give students an energy compensation for blokverwarming [cheer_up_readmore]This allows one boiler to heat several homes. [/cheer_up_readmore] In doing so, Duwo had to submit (in Dutch) about 1,000 separate applications to the Central Government. ‘We also helped our tenants with a one-time payment as compensation. All this brought a lot of extra work to the relevant colleagues which meant that we were unable to start on the 2022 accounts on time.’

Paying extra

Duwo says that residents do not have to worry that they will have to pay a large extra amount. ‘The energy costs in 2022 were from before the energy crisis, so – as long as the energy consumption stayed around the same – the bill will not be different from the years before that.”

The same goes for the 2023 bill. ‘Because of the rising energy costs, the decision was taken at the end of 2022 to raise the monthly service costs as of 1 January. This allowed us to protect our residents from having to pay afterwards for the price hikes.’

Jonathan is happy to hear that Duwo says that the final bill will not be too bad. However, he does think that Duwo’s information provision could be improved. “Before this, all we knew was that it would take longer because of technical problems, but we had no idea about how high the bill would be. And this was exactly what we were worried about. Despite its good intentions, it doesn’t look like Duwo is able to put itself into the shoes of its tenants.”