Debt for utility payments of the Ukrainians at the beginning of March exceeded UAH 40 billion for the first time. The MP from the Opposition Bloc Serhiy Lovochkin demands the government to urgently take systematic measures aimed at solving the problems of accumulated debt of the population. This is stated in the request of the MP to Prime Minister Volodymyr Groisman.

“I demand to urgently take systematic measures aimed at solving problems of accumulated debt of the population for utility payments, as well as in the energy market,” Serhiy Lovochkin wrote.

He said that the debt for municipal services of the population, excluding debt for electricity, increased by almost UAH 8 billion only for the first two months of 2018. Thus, at the beginning of March, the total debt for utility payments exceeded UAH 40 billion.

As indicated in the request, the level of payment for municipal services of the population was 75.3% in February 2018, since the beginning of the year – 71.7%. At the same time, in several regions, the situation is significantly worse than the national average. Thus, since the beginning of the year, residents of Luhansk Oblast were able to pay only 54.6% of the services provided, Kherson – 58.1%, Donetsk – 61.8%, Kharkiv – 62.3%, Zaporizhzhia – 62.4%, Dnipropetrovsk – 65, 4%.

The politician believes that the main reason for the rapid increase in debts for municipal services is the unjustified increase in utility tariffs, the size of which in recent years has grown many times against the background of a reduction in real incomes of the vast majority of people.

“In the future, the situation with non-payments in this area can significantly aggravate due to another rise in gas prices within the framework of the IMF program, which will result in a government-approved formula for linking the price of gas on the domestic market to the cost of imported gas,” Serhiy Lovochkin added.