AN electricity consumers body is urging ScottishPower to abolish rental charges for pre-payment meters which, it claims, penalise almost 400,000 customers on low incomes.
The Southern Scotland Electricity Consumers Committee said yesterday that it was ``very unhappy'' that ScottishPower had failed to respond to a previous call for the abolition of the annual rental charge, and claimed the company should scrap it as a matter of principle.
Pre-payment meters are part of a budget payment system in which a customer buys #5 Powercards and inserts them into the meter or collection device, allowing them to pay for their electricity as they use it.
Most electricity companies operate a form of the system and ScottishPower currently charges about #20 a year for rental of the meters.
The company has frozen the charges for the third successive year, in a bid to reduce the financial pressure on low-income customers, but the consumers committee believes part of the reason it has not abolished the charge is that it generates about #8m per year.
Speaking at the launch of the committee's annual report for 1995-96, chairman Graeme Millar said: ``Pre-payment meters are of prime concern to us because this payment method is used by those who can least afford to pay more. The committee will not rest until the rental charge is abolished.''
He said that people who are living on the poverty line and may go into debt through no fault of their own were often persuaded that a pre-payment meter would help them, but were penalised because of the rental charge.
There was also no legislative control over the meters in terms of accuracy, and the committee had noticed an increase in the number of complaints about them.
Calling on ScottishPower to follow the example of Hydro Electric, which provides pre-payment meters free to customers, Mr Millar said, however, this created anomalies in some areas, whereby a customer on one side of the street was not charged rental while a customer on the other side was.
Mr Hammy Smillie, ScottishPower's customer services manager, yesterday refused to rule out the possibility of abolishing the charges, but said there were important cost issues to be considered.
He said: ``The pre-payment equipment is more expensive than the normal electricity meter. The Powercards have to be printed and we pay commission to people such as the Post Office, who distribute them, so that makes it more expensive. The meters also have a shorter life span than normal meters.''
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