Debate contribution: NI Water: Funding and Governance

Debate contribution by Mr Andrew McMurray on 29 April 2025.

MLA

Mr Andrew McMurray

Party at the time

Alliance Party

Date

29 April 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Opposition Business

Heading

NI Water: Funding and Governance

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4922239

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thank you, Madam Principal Deputy Speaker. I apologise. I was a bit trigger-happy there. I thank the Opposition for tabling what is an important motion. Our amendment seeks merely to augment the motion, not to change it, because the Alliance Party is in agreement with the points that are made in it. Our waste water system is in crisis. Lough Neagh is broken, and Belfast lough is going the same way. Construction has ground to a halt in many parts of the country, and NI Water has breached its resource budget. We do not yet know the reasons for the overspend, but NI Water has been clear that it cannot meet its legal obligations in the context of the huge resource and capital funding gaps that we are currently witnessing. I look forward to reading the findings of the forensic audit once it is complete. There is broad agreement across the political spectrum that the crisis is real and is getting worse, yet the Minister continues to cling to the deeply flawed three-pronged approach. The first prong, which is to work with Executive colleagues to increase waste water investment, resulted in an extra £19·5 million in capital funding last year, which reduced NI Water's capital funding gap to £246·5 million. That investment falls far short of what is needed. Developer contributions — the second prong — are widely considered to be viable only for high-end properties, and they carry with them a very real risk of driving up house prices and making homeownership even harder for lower-income families. Indeed, those developer contributions are a hidden water fee. What is more, they are a particularly unfair version of a water fee, because they disproportionately hit those who are at the bottom of the housing ladder. That is the opposite of progressive policy. That leaves the third prong: the water, flooding and sustainable drainage Bill. I have no issue with sustainable drainage. In fact, I am in favour of it. Natural flood management and sustainable drainage systems can and will improve things, but only somewhat. The capacity issues in our waste water system are so severe, however, that we need significant and hard investment in infrastructure in order to address them. Chronic underfunding is the cause —.

I thank the Member for his intervention. Yes, schools, hospitals, small businesses, medium-sized businesses, large businesses and homes are all affected. We know the socio-economic impact of that, so I cannot disagree. Chronic underfunding is the cause of those capacity issues. If we are to address them, the underfunding must stop. The Minister is on record as saying that she believes not that the model is not working but that the problem is that we do not have enough funding. We put it to the Minister that that funding will never come. It is wrong to continue to cling to a model when its basic conditions cannot be met and the consequences for our environment, our economy and our basic needs are so dire. We have to accept the reality that we live in, and we have to address it. NI Water will still need significant investment. To be precise, compared with what it got last year, it will need an extra £269·5 million of resource and capital funding every year — that is the scale of the problem — and the three-pronged approach cannot and will not fix that. NI Water will never be in a sustainable financial position as long as the Minister clings to that funding model, which leaves our water system without the investment that it needs, and refuses to look at alternatives. The Minister wrote to the Committee recently, stating that several reviews had already been carried out, but those reviews were led by civil servants and were internal policy development submissions that provided advice within the policy framework for funding NI Water, as endorsed by the Executive and the Assembly. It does not sound as though they looked at alternative frameworks at all, because doing so would mean looking outside the existing policy framework. Yesterday, during Question Time, we heard that the Department has reviewed other funding models but only to evaluate whether they are compatible with the current funding model, which, of course, they are not. We were also told that officials are reviewing alternative models against three key tests, which, again, the current model cannot meet. There were two Research and Information Service (RaISe) research papers and an NI Audit Office report. The latter focused on Northern Ireland and gave only a cursory look at alternative funding models. With the greatest respect for the authors of those reports, I say that none was an expert on funding models for water and waste water provision, and only some of them were independent. That is why the NI Audit Office encouraged the Department and NI Water:

"to complete a comprehensive review of the alternative funding and governance arrangements, led by suitably qualified experts."

That is what Alliance calls for.

830 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:28 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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