No
7. So obviously you haven’t got any meters, so there’s no way a customer can independently verify any energy charges for the year?
But there’s the trust that because it’s a community trust, a fair energy charge is not simply going to be raised for profit margins or anything like that. Yeah. And obviously as a public housing association we have our year end accounts available for people to look at if they wish So the accounts of the community trust can be publicly viewed as well. Yeah, yeah.
Ok that’s really good.
Ok so onto the general questions, we’ve probably covered them.
8. With regards to the district heating system, why did the community trust decide to take that on top of the housing and not just sell it off to a private operator?
Well I think the impression I get from talking to others in the world of district heating is a lot of the disquiet about district heating is where private operators operate it focused on profit rather than service. I think that’s led to district heating being discredited rather than being seen as an asset. Its obviously quite a good thing for a community and for energy systems worldwide its quite a good efficient system. Yes, yeah. So its better for the consumer. The other thing that’s a big factor for the community trust, it obviously takes quite a bit of expertise to maintain and manage a district heating network. Which a lot of housing organisations would really struggle with. Now fortunately the byker trust has got a good working relationship with the city council, and the city council run quite a lot of big heat and energy plants across the city and we use the city council, on the mains side anyway, to operate the system for us. So we’ve got both the social motive to keep it inhouse; our system for our tenants and then we’ve got the technical skills readily available to us through the council to - 116 -