The Post: Action on water use is urgently needed, but what system is fairest?
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Water corrodes, as with rust: but what if putting a price on water is also corrosive? This question lies at the heart of a debate on metering and charging that has taken on renewed force as a hot, dry summer approaches.
Over half of New Zealand households have user-pays water systems: usage is tracked by meters and charged via volume-based bills. Proponents of such systems insist they’re the only viable way to reduce both leaks and excessive water usage. But many areas, including much of my native Wellington, hold out against this trend.
The objections to user-pays typically take two forms. The first concerns economic disparities: when some people have far less money than others, they may be locked out of anything that comes with a price tag.
The other objection centres on “the corrosive tendency of markets”, to quote the philosopher Michael Sandel’s superb book What Money Can’t Buy. “Putting a price on the good things in life,” he warns, “can corrupt them.”
We don’t allow trade in human beings, or body parts, or votes, because we don’t want to treat them as commodities, as instruments of profit and use. People should instead be treated as persons worthy of dignity and respect, voting as a civic responsibility.
So too, arguably, with water. A natural resource, and essential to life, it is something we want everyone to have, as a mark of their citizenship, their basic humanity. User-pays can cut against that.
Some argue everyone already pays for water: if not through user-pays, then through fixed charges. But that’s facile.
Fixed charges embody an entirely different value system. Like taxes, they ensure (or should ensure) that the provision of water is funded collectively, according to what each household can afford to contribute; and from that (literal) pool of collective resources, each takes what they need.
This system, alas, has practical flaws. Most troublingly, it seems unable to fix leaks or restrain water use.
Councils can, and do, send out staff with leak-sensing devices. But it is vastly quicker and more effective, experts say, to have meters placed by tobies, where they can instantly detect leaks both on private properties and in a council’s wider network.
This is an unignorable message in Wellington, where a staggering 40 out of every 100 litres is wasted. Wellington Water could, of course, do a better job of fixing the obvious, surface-level leaks, but many of the biggest are deep underground and – in the absence of meters – likely to remain undetected.
Meters, however, lead inevitably to volume-based charges. That move can be defended, though some of the arguments deployed are – again – of the facile kind.
People only value what they pay for, the reasoning goes. But that would be news to the millions of men who died for their countries in war, or to anyone who loves spending time with their family.
In truth we value all kinds of things that have no monetary charge attached. I know countless Wellingtonians who lovingly conserve water – taking quick showers, putting their washing machine on a short cycle, not running the tap while toothbrushing – even when no fees apply.
The problem, sadly, is that many of their fellow residents remain profligate water users, and seemingly unrepentant: exhortations on billboards don’t stop them washing their car with a hose, or constantly refilling their pool, or running their sprinklers 24/7.
User-pays, though, might well work. The proof? Metered residents of Auckland and Tauranga use an average of 160 and 174 litres per day, respectively; the figures for unmetered Dunedin, Hamilton and Wellington are 212, 224 and 229 litres.
In Kāpiti, usage fell by one-fifth when the council introduced metering; hundreds of leaks were located. Expensive investment in new infrastructure suddenly became unnecessary, and high-volume users paid a greater share of the remaining cost. Charges fell for three-quarters of residents.
I still feel uneasy about user-pays, though, for the reasons Sandel outlines. So I’d only support its extension under certain conditions.
First, there should be exemptions from charges on hardship grounds, no-one should ever have their water supply cut off for non-payment, and larger families – typical in both poorer and multigenerational households – should be eligible for discounts.
Second, I prefer the Christchurch system, where there is a free allocation of water and residents are charged only for use over that amount, to the Kāpiti one, where every drop of water has a dollar sign attached. A free allocation acknowledges the human right to water, the desire not to marketise certain things, while retaining the metering that detects leaks and the charging that catches the biggest users.
Some people would still lose out, perhaps. But there’s no perfect system. And as four-tenths of Wellington’s water continues to be wasted, summer restrictions loom, and even the prospect of long-term shortages hoves into view, the need for action becomes ever more urgent.