Draft Remarks on Water Services Bill

I would like to welcome this Bill chiefly for two reasons:

For too long now Dublin has suffered from an inadequate water infrastructure. Inadequate supply, antiquated piping that is prone to breaking and serous leakage, very poor waste-water drainage. The system operates on a knife edge, and when it slips, it is a great imposition on many people. And certainly, from a business perspective, it has hampered investment. Dublin as the economic engine of the capital needs better water infrastructure. This Bill is the first step.

My second reason for welcoming this Bill is that it is a central strand of the Fine Gael New Era policy document. A document which was drafted around the time that I entered politics, which then showed a clear vision for the country, and I am glad to see it being enacted now.

I think the case for introducing water charges and water metring is proven so I won’t go in to that here only to say that water charges are necessary.

The establishment of Irish Water is a big positive in the strategy to introduce water metring.

It will bring greater accountability to this area of government spend as we will have one public body responsible to the people rather than a patchwork of local authorities often not working together.

It will deliver efficiencies and cost savings in our water supply.

It will bring improvements to all aspects of our water system and its supply, which is essential for continued development and investment.

There will be a changeover period from the local authorities to Irish Water. This will likely be bumpy, this is an ambitious project. People should be prepared for that and will hopefully bear with us. But we cannot let the changeover become too protracted.

Insofar as the construction phase is concerned, we want to see Irish small and medium enterprises successful in their tendering for work and we do hope that this will mean jobs here in Ireland.

Leakage must be the first priority of the new authority: to reduce waste, improve the service, and eventually reduce the cost of delivering that service. We will have a difficulty in levying high charges on people in those parts of the country that have a high leakage rate, because ultimately they will be paying for the water lost through leakage. This will be for the regulator to consider.

The metring phase will take time and not all homes will come on-line at once. I would caution against introducing a flat charge until such time as the metring phase is complete. Instead I would defer any water charges until all homes are metred and can then be charged on a per usage basis rather than an indiscriminate flat charge for all, or some on a staggered basis.

Flat charges on utilities are not fair.

Insofar as apartments are concerned, it is my understanding that there will be a difficulty in metring individual units initially, and that one proposal would be to metre the apartment building and sub-divide the cost of usage between the individual units, regardless of what they each individually use, the number of occupants etc. I don’t think this will work and I would strongly caution against this also.

Some other way must be found, if not a deferral. And if a deferral requires renegotiating part of the bailout agreement, then let’s do that. We have renegotiated other aspects of it successfully.

We should be careful before introducing changes that are necessary, but which may not be perceived as fair because of the manner in which they are introduced, because this could seriously undermine support and buy-in for the project as a whole.

These are just some comments on what will be a hugely important and positive development for the country and I congratulate the Minister on bringing the Bill before the House.

Click here to watch a video of my contribution to the debate.