More than half of all households in Oslo are now made up of just one person living alone, according to state statistics SSB. Singles also account for around 40 percent of households nationwide, and now they’re joining forces to protest alleged discrimination.
The singles don’t think it’s right, for example, that they pay the same amount of monthly energy bills in homeowner associations as that of families. “Single-person households stand on average much weaker in all areas, especially economically, than householdes made up of two or more,” Agnes Husbyn, for secretary general of the singles’ lobby group Ensliges Landsforbund, wrote in newspaper Aftenposten over the weekend.
Husbyn aimed to carry on a campaign to set up mandatory measuring not just of electricity usage every month but also water, sewage, and garbage collection as well.
“We are still lacking concrete measures to make some changes,” Husbyn wrote. She accused the state of turning responsibility for installing meters to track actual consumption over to local governments, while her group calls for a national response to complaints.
newsinenglish.no staff
