Decision Report 201202467

Summary

Mr C complained about the delay in Scottish Water providing a water connection to his property. It took almost five months from his initial application for the connection to be completed. When Scottish Water responded to Mr C's complaint – and to our investigation – they acknowledged that there had been a delay. However, they also said that providing the connection was complicated because of the physical features of the land, as well as where Mr C's property's was on it. They explained that previous enquiries about connecting the property had been declined for these reasons.

In investigating Mr C's complaint, our role was to consider whether there was evidence of administrative fault, omission or failure by Scottish Water that meant the delay in providing the connection was unreasonable in the circumstances. We found that they had been in contact with him throughout the process and, taking everything into account, we did not uphold his complaint. We did, however, find that Scottish Water extended the delay by a couple of weeks because of an internal processing error about a repair to be done to their water main (although we noted that the repair was needed because of work done by Mr C's contractor). In light of this we made two recommendations.

Recommendations

We recommended that Scottish Water:

• confirm the steps they have taken to address internal communications, as detailed in their response to the Ombudsman; and
• consider refunding a portion of their connection fee to Mr C in light of their failure to raise a service request for the work on the water main.