From Mr S. Zerafa

I refer to the report “Pay and complain: it’s all chaos” (TMIS, 5 March).

As an organisation that is committed to putting the customer first, the Water Services Corporation readily admits its shortcomings and, on a number of occasions, has publicly apologised to readers for their justified complaints.

However, we simply cannot accept the vague and misleading sweeping statements made in last Sunday’s report.

Notwithstanding the below-the-belt type of exaggerations, designed to exploit customers’ understandable annoyance at having to pay expensive bills, we still carried out our own internal investigation to see whether the unidentified author was correct.

One must bear in mind that from 6 to 24 February, 100,000 bills were sent to consumers, so a certain level of queuing to enquire about or pay bills was only to be expected. Nevertheless, our data shows that although the queues mentioned in the article often comprised some 20-odd persons, the six to eight front line staff at the counter, meant that processing times were quite reasonable.

If the person who penned the article is willing to specify a particular day and time, we would be willing to re-examine the Corporation’s recorded security footage in their presence to demonstrate that the queues and chaos mentioned in the article were simply unfounded allegations

Stephen Zerafa

Head Public Relations

Water Services Corporation

Editor’s note: Our reporter was there on Friday 3 March at around 9am. But what Mr Zerafa, or his superiors, really should do is to turn up incognito and sit with the people and register his impressions.