Damning Wellington Water report details leaked

Friday, 8 December 2023

Leaked details from a report into Wellington Water have highlighted a number of failures in the beleaguered water utility, including duplicated jobs and soaring costs.

The full draft report — partly intended to improve transparency — remains under tight wraps, with even Wellington City Councillors only allowed to see part of it on a screen during a closed workshop, it is understood.

The Post has obtained key findings from it.

Among them are a lack of clearly defined reporting and performance measures with contractors, that the Wellington City Council carries the majority of risk, and that costs to the council have soared much higher than contractor costs.

It found a convoluted process meant customer calls were duplicated, leading to a back-and forth between Wellington Water and the council. Jobs were regularly duplicated in the process, leading to significant delays in crews being sent to fix problems.

Wellington Water chief executive Tonia Haskell came out of an emergency planning exercise on Wednesday with a warning for the city: “The combination of increasing leaks, population growth and relatively high use in comparison to other metropolitan cities in New Zealand, means the risk of a water shortage is real – even in an average summer,” she said.

It comes after years of high-profile pipe failures around Wellington, widely blamed on decades of council underinvestment, and soon after Wellington Water warned the repairs would cost $1 billion a year across the district.

The new National-led government is looking to ditch the last government’s Three Waters reforms but keep key aspects of it. Hutt South MP Chris Bishop, now the Infrastructure Minister, previously said that it was likely Wellington Water would take over the water assets from the council.

This would mean a significant change to the relationship between the council and Wellington Water — a relationship in-part the council just got a third party to review. The council would not reveal the cost of the review on Thursday.

Council chief executive Barbara McKerrow said Wellington Water agreed to the review as part of the council’s 2023 to 2024 annual plan process, which gave it an extra $2.3m to fix leaks.

The review was about “improving efficiency, identifying potential cost savings and improving transparency and reporting”, she said.

The final review, when received, would “be the basis” for talks with Wellington Water and other councils, she said.

The council has been asked to clarify why a report aimed at improving “transparency and reporting” remains so secret that details only became known via a leak.

Council spokesperson Richard MacLean said the report was not secret but “it just isn’t finished yet”. It was jointly commissioned by the council and Wellington Water, he said. Melbourne workplace performance specialists FieldForce4 were doing the review.

Haskell said Wellington Water was not invited to this week’s presentation to councillors so she did not know what they were shown from the report.

“We are facing a very very tricky summer in the middle of an investment gap while the country is looking at water reform,” she said.

“We don’t need this distraction.”

Hutt City Mayor Campbell Barry, who chairs the Wellington Water committee, said Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau had requested a meeting with him to discuss the report. He planned to take that meeting within the next week.

“There’s nothing else I can say at this point,” he said.

Wellington Water is the the water utility for the Wellington region and is owned by six councils, including South Wairarapa. The Wellington City Council is its biggest funder and went it alone with the report.