Over the past few months as with all businesses, we have seen significant spikes in fuel prices, which have directly impacted our operational costs. While we have done our best to absorb these rising expenses, we are now forced take some action to continue providing you with the same high level of service.

Firstly, we are classified at present as a life-critical service, so we understand our access to fuel is not at risk, and we can continue to provide service to you. 

We have decided not to adjust our current fees for routine services. As normal, we will adjust these in June to the CPI figures released by RBNZ in the year ending March. These are yet to come, but we expect this to land about 4%. Fuel increases should not impact this given the fuel issues have really only been felt for the last two weeks of the quarter. Hopefully the impact will be short-lived and CPI for the 26/27 FY will not be overly influenced by this crisis.

Next, we have also decided not to adjust our standard metro vehicle fee, but we will introduce a temporary fuel surcharge which will appear as an additional cost on work we quote or undertake. Quotes which are issued and yet to be accepted will stand at the quoted price, but if they are renewed or new quotes issued, we will adjust the fuel costs at that time. We will increase our out-of-town mileage rate to reflect the costs to run vehicles, but we will review both the surcharge and mileage rate on a monthly basis until fuel costs return to normal. 

For those with diesel fire pumps, we have requested the Fire Protection Association review the amount of running time we undertake testing for to reduce the use of diesel fuel. We will keep you updated on this as we progress.

We take this action only as a last resort, and we are managing this on a fully transparent basis for our customers while continuing to manage the pressures on the country and we are absorbing what we can. We assure you we will do what we can to mitigate increased costs in the future and hope that we reach normality again soon. 
 
Thank you for your understanding. 

Best regards,

CHARLIE LOUGHNAN

Corporate Services Manager
DDI 03 339 9015
Mob 0272 427 543