The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is going to revise the previously postponed document “On housing and communal services”, according to which residents of Ukraine will be fined for late payment of utilities. This was reported by the public organization Public Audit, whose employees analyzed the text of the bill. The conclusions of the experts who reviewed it are extremely disappointing for ordinary people: if it is put into effect, the living conditions of citizens will become immeasurably worse – at a minimum, debtors will be charged 100% of the amount of the debt.
The deputies are not at all concerned by the fact that even now not every resident of the country can cope with the level of prices for housing and utilities: this item of expenditure (according to previously published state statistics) takes away at least 16% of income even from wealthy families, and after the tariff revision only 19% of residents of large cities will be able to pay. The hardest hit are the low-income and socially vulnerable groups of the population, who have also been deprived of benefits (single mothers, orphans, children left without guardianship, disabled children).
At the same time, they “forgot” to include clauses in the bill on increasing liability for the supply of low-quality housing and communal services, and also did not provide for the possibility of discussing tariffs in the context of conditions dictated by the market. In fact, according to this document, Ukrainians can be provided with extremely low-quality services in a monopoly version, without the right to choose, at any price. Observers believe that the emphasis on draconian fines is made in order to have the opportunity to requisition apartments from debtors, because according to recently approved documents, the basis for such an action can be an amount of 10 minimum wages (about 14,500 hryvnia).
SKELET-info