The Irish Gov­ern­ment has launched a con­sul­ta­tion process (Jan­u­ary 2012) con­cern­ing water pol­icy, includ­ing issues of water meter­ing and water rates, as well as plans to set up a new national water util­ity. It is invit­ing responses to its posi­tion paper, “Reform of the Water Sec­tor in Ire­land”, until 24 Feb­ru­ary 2012. The doc­u­ment offers a use­ful win­dow on gov­ern­ment think­ing and on the var­i­ous pres­sures and prob­lems that may well ulti­mately shape policy.

The posi­tion paper lays out gov­ern­ment plans to form a national water util­ity which will man­age all issues relat­ing to domes­tic and com­mer­cial water sup­ply, address envi­ron­men­tal and climage change issues, over­see imple­men­ta­tion of aspects of EU pol­icy (impor­tant dead­lines are loom­ing) and respond to changes in pop­u­la­tion nation­ally and in urban areas.

The doc­u­ment also restates the gov­ern­ment ideal of imple­ment­ing water meters in every house­hold in the coun­try, and to charge users by usage beyond a cer­tain free quota of water per house­hold. Sev­eral pres­sures emerge here.

First, while the goal is to bring in rev­enue that will meet the cost of our water sup­ply, sup­ply­ing and installing water meters will itself be costly and time con­sum­ing. The doc­u­ment con­sid­ers the pos­si­bil­ity of sim­ply intro­duc­ing a flat-rate charge, but recog­nises that, though this would require no gov­ern­ment invest­ment in meter­ing, it would not address the need to con­serve already lim­ited water sup­plies. A sec­ond option con­sid­ered is to spread instal­la­tion over a period of ten years or more, with a flat-rate charged being imposed on those with­out meters. (100,000 house­hold per year until 2021 would leave 500,000 homes unmetered.)

A fur­ther idea is to have an opt-in sys­tem where house­holds could choose to have a water meter installed, bear at least some costs of the instal­la­tion, and claw back some of those costs by acheiv­ing water usage reduc­tions. The idea is that it would prove cheaper in the long-run to install a water meter than to remain on a higher flat-rate charge. The doc­u­ment acknowl­edges that this would be socially divi­sive — more avail­able to those with greater means. Finally, the pos­si­bil­ity of installing meters only in cer­tain cat­e­gories of prop­erty is con­sid­ered, e.g. in new houses, sold houses, rental prop­er­ties, etc.

(A rather dif­fer­ent option con­sid­ered, but largely dis­missed, is to focus on repair­ing the exist­ing water net­work to elim­i­nate leak­age. How­ever, the high costs mean that sav­ings would be sig­nif­i­cantly less than the rev­enue gen­er­ated by water meter­ing. This approach would do noth­ing to change our water usage patterns.)

The fun­da­men­tal draw­back of all of these options is pretty clear: water meter­ing both as a source of rev­enue and an impe­tus towards water con­ser­va­tion will be sig­nif­i­cantly under­mined if it is not imple­mented quickly and uni­ver­sally. And many will be (rightly) unhappy with the inequal­i­ties of treat­ment any of these alter­na­tive options will gen­er­ate. At the same time, the EU/IMF deal requires that water meter­ing gen­er­ate a rev­enue stream by 2014. In this frame­work, it is not cer­tain what free domes­tic quota of water, if any, the gov­ern­ment will be able to afford.

In sum, on these issues, the posi­tion paper raises more ques­tions than it offers poten­tial solu­tions, sug­gest­ing that the con­sul­ta­tion process needs to part of a sub­stan­tial debate on these issues. In years to come, we might well come to regret deci­sions made on the basis of finan­cial prac­ti­cal­ity rather than good prac­tice, which attends to the needs of house­holds and the pres­sures upon them.