Water Meters and Cash ISAs

Money Box

BBC

Business

4.2 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Money Box can exclusively reveal there has been a sharp rise in the number of people applying to have water meters fitted to try to bring their bills down. The data has been shared with this programme by the Consumer Council for Water, the CCW, the which speaks for water consumers in England and Wales. It comes after record April price rises for water with average bills rising more than £120 to over £600 per year.

Cash ISAs appear to have been reprieved - at least for now. Until Friday morning there was widespread speculation that the Chancellor might announce on Tuesday that the amount you could put into a cash ISA would be slashed from £20,000, perhaps to as little as £4000. The idea was that would fit in with government plans to encourage investment by nudging people with £20,000 to spare to use the rest of their tax free ISA allowance to invest in shares instead. However, Money Box understands that won't happen - certainly not on Tuesday when Rachel Reeves gives her annual Mansion House speech to the City of London. We'll look at what that might mean.

And what does a major ruling on a divorce case in the Supreme Court mean for how wealth is split between couples in the future?

Presenter: Paul Lewis Reporter: Dan Whitworth Researchers: Eimear Devlin and Jo Krasner Editor: Jess Quayle

(First broadcast 12pm Saturday 12th July 2025)

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.7	Hello, welcome to this Moneybox podcast.
0:07.9	Millions of us love cash Isis and plans to limit how much we can put into them
0:12.4	will not go ahead at least for now.
0:15.4	And what are the implications of a major ruling by the Supreme Court
0:19.0	on how couples should split their wealth when they
0:21.7	divorce. But first, hose pipe bans for millions in Yorkshire and now Kent, the warmest and
0:27.6	sunniest spring ever recorded, and we're all basking or sweating in the third heat wave
0:33.1	in as many months. But just when we need to use more water, Moneybox can reveal, as you may have
0:38.7	heard in the news, that there's been a sharp rise in the number of people applying to have
0:43.3	water meters fitted to try to bring bills down. The data has been shared with this programme by
0:48.8	the Consumer Council for Water, the CCW, which speaks for water consumers. I guess that's all of us really, in England
0:55.4	and Wales anyway. The move to metres follows those record April price rises for water,
1:01.1	when average bills rose more than £120 to over £600 a year. Dan Whitworth's been in our
1:08.0	flooded inbox splashing around. What poles did he find?
1:12.1	Well, what makes this insight so interesting, Paul, is that the CCW is able to get data from water companies that just is not publicly available.
1:20.2	And it shows that during the main billing period this year, so that's February, March and April, when most bills are sent out to people. The requests for water meters from most major suppliers doubled.
1:31.7	And for some smaller suppliers, water meter requests more than tripled.
1:36.4	Now, CCW says that equates to tens of thousands of extra requests for water meters,
1:42.7	including from people like Luke Chapman, who moved into
1:45.9	a small one-bedroom flap in London with his fiancée Rebecca back in May.
1:50.5	So we've been here for a couple of months now, and when we moved in, we signed up for
	...

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