Drawing a line under water fiasco

There is a classic syndrome in much organisational strategy which is called “escalation of prior commitment” . This is also known as ‘throwing good money after bad’. Sometimes the thing to do is stop.

Let’s look at the finances. At a sectoral level it costs €1.2bn per annum to run the water system. Water needs to be harvested, treated, delivered; sewage needs to be collected, treated, discharged; the system needs to be operated and managed. Right now a large part of the problem is that the doing of all this is spread across literally dozens of local government bodies. This is inefficient. Water and sewage in a modern European society are, at least at the infrastructure level, a natural monopoly. There are likely to be significant benefits from operating the whole system as one. It needs therefore to be funded.

A second issue is upwards of 40% of water is believed lost in transit, through the disjointed infrastructu re.