Between excessive increases in charges and threats of withholding of housing benefits, the tenants of Pays d’Aix Habitat are at their wits’ end. Around a hundred of them gathered this Thursday, December 19 in the morning in the main hall of the social landlord, a strong sign of protest against measures that they are no longer able to follow. Calmly, they crowded for a while under the desks which hosted the day’s board of directors.
Since the implementation of individual pricing for heating charges, calculated from distributors installed on radiators, some households have found themselves with an adjustment three to four times higher than the usual amount. As a reminder, for several years the law has required the installation of distributors, allowing each tenant to control and pay for their own consumption. « This law also requires the lessor to inform the tenant about the calculation world and the operation of its dispatchers. Pays d’Aix Habitat has not done so. He implemented these splitters a year or two ago and only applied the calculation this year », indicates Nathalie Leconte, president of the local union of the National Housing Confederation (CNL). Some tenants present during this morning of protest found themselves paying up to 3,000 euros in charges.
Faced with the impossibility of paying these disproportionate sums for these residents who « have little income and usually see their expenses reimbursed at the end of the financial year », ten days ago, the tenants received letters « d’intimidation » on the part of the lessor, explains one of them. These letters threatened to suspend everyone’s housing assistance allowances (APL) in the event of non-payment. « This letter is not regulatory. A suspension cannot be done on a charge debt », reassures Natalie Leconte.
For his part, Jean-Louis Vincent, president of Pays d’Aix Habitat Métropole, ended up agreeing to meet the tenants, who came in large numbers to the hall. He assured that a letter of apology would be sent to residents, admitting that the office had exceeded its limits with this letter. A meeting in January regarding the charges file was also scheduled on the job. It will bring together the president, the general director of Pays d’Aix Habitat, the charges department and the CNL, which, for its part, will consult a law firm at the beginning of January to follow this file legally.
