Experts from the Higher School of Economics and the Institute of Urban Economics have proposed an alternative scheme for determining tariffs in the housing and communal services sector. According to them, the new approach to tariff policy should be based on assessing the financial affordability of public utilities services for the population. This was reported by RBC.
Experts note that in recent years the housing and communal services sector has suffered from insufficient financing. The infrastructure infrastructure was severely deteriorated and there were many accidents associated with this.
According to experts, one of the main reasons for this is that tariffs for housing and communal services for citizens are increasing slower than real inflation. To change the situation, they propose using the share of beneficiaries of housing and communal services benefits as a criterion for increasing wages.
If there are more than 15% of such families in an area, tariffs cannot be increased. If it is below 15%, you can increase the fee up to 30%.
However, this requires uniform federal standards for the allocation of subsidies. Now they differ in different regions of the Russian Federation. HSE experts believe that their implementation will improve the situation in the housing and communal services sector.
Overall, the new approach will create additional revenue for utilities but increase the burden on wealthier households. Implementing this will require difficult political decisions, the study’s authors note.
Before that experts offered Limiting preferential energy consumption in the Russian Federation.
Russians before saidHow to save on bills in winter?