Why there should be no charge for ‘liquid sunshine’

THE recent report of the Commission on Taxation recommends that the Government introduces domestic water charges as a way of generating revenue for local authorities.

I urge the Government not to take up that recommendation for the very reasons that its own negotiators gave the European Commission for not taxing householders for water.

In formulating water legislation, now part of the water framework directive, the commission proposed that all water should be paid for. Water pollution was an especially serious problem in the large industrialised and urbanised member states that required complex, expensive water recovery and treatment processes.