Wellington fixing leaks faster but plea to turn up the funding tap remains

Thursday, 20 February 2025

A faster and more-efficient Wellington Water finally has cause to crow – but is far from out of the woods.

This time last year Wellington Water was sitting on an 800-leak backlog. The cost to fix each leak had tripled and the region, outside of Kāpiti, was losing 44% of treated drinking water. There was a ban was put on sprinklers and irrigation and the chance of a ban on all outdoor use sat at 43%.

Fast forward to the summer and water restrictions are far less – unless you are in South Wairarapa – with the chance of them tightening up at just 1% in January.

Part of the reasons for that turnaround, on top of a wetter summer, are new figures showing that, when there is a leak, Wellington Water are dealing with it much faster.

Across almost all metrics and all major councils – Wellington City, Porirua, Upper Hutt and Hutt City – it has notably cut response times for responding to leaks, repairing leaks and non-urgent repairs. This is true for wastewater and tap water.

But any sense of Wellington being out of its water crisis are misplaced. Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty has recently been doing the rounds of the councils that own the utility asking for more money and warning the pipe crisis, caused by decades of underinvestment, would worsen before it improved.

“Even if the money tap got turned on today, it is 11 years until we have a day as good as today,” he recently warned the Greater Wellington Regional Council.

Now all councils apart from Wellington City are seeing Wellington Water dealing with leaks in the target times councils set.

In Wellington City last year, urgent water leak response times averaged 2 hours and 30 minutes but that was now 1 hour and 12 minutes. Urgent repairs used to take 13 hours and 34 minutes but that was now 3 hours and 38 minutes.

Over at wastewater, responses had dropped from 1 hour and 20 minutes to 1 hour and 9 minutes while urgent repairs dropped from 4 hours and 55 minutes to three hours and 42 minutes.

Non-urgent repairs dropped from 45 days to 13. All numbers are averages.

Wellington Water chairperson Nick Leggett said the faster responses meant it was fixing small issues before they became big.

“At the start of 2024 we started to see the benefits of councils’ increased investment finding and fixing leaks, which has helped us deliver the results we’re seeing today,” Leggett said.

“When leaks were at their highest, we didn’t have the funding available to find and fix them all. So to protect our water supply we had to focus on the biggest leaks first.

“Unfortunately, this meant that smaller, non-urgent leaks were left for weeks, if not months.”

The numbers pointed to system improvements but what was really needed to get on top of the overarching issue was “big chunks of money”, he said.

A new water entity, which would take over the region’s water from Wellington Water in the “next year or so”, would come with more efficiencies, he said.