Wellington Water admits neglecting damning report

Wednesday, 16 April 2025

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Wellington Water admits neglecting a damning report four years ago that lays out similar struggles to those it’s had with its alliance partnership’s main contractor Fulton Hogan today.

The report was approved by then chief executive Colin Crampton in 2021 but a spokesperson said leadership did not provide the resources needed to deliver the plan.

The 2021 report was revealed in a paper released ahead of the Wellington Water committee meeting next week.

A spokesperson said the missing report was recently brought to the attention of the executive leadership team by staff and it was decided to include the recommendations in the list presented to the committee.

The report was commissioned to assess Wellington Water’s reporting of non-financial measures, the billing and invoicing process in relation to its frontline network maintenance and operations Alliance, and to provide recommendations for improvement.

It recommended the entity make refinements to the Alliance partnership operating model, including strengthening existing financial management practices, ensuring costs and progress of work were actively tracked and monitored and implementing a process to review crew member performance and service quality.

It also says its performance reporting was inefficient and lacked data quality, and the entity had no consistent approach to validating capital and operating expenditure and third party claims.

It’s a different story to a half-year report that was published the same year, that said the entity was in a “better situation” than many, and was performing well against its operating budget.

The spokesperson said after Crampton accepted the report, it was provided to the board for information as part of a wider programme of work.

The organisation developed an action plan to deliver on these recommendations at the time, but was not given the resources by leadership.

“This report landed at a time where the culture at Wellington Water allowed for risks and issues to be left unaddressed,” the spokesperson said. “This is the very culture we have been working hard to change.

“We are shifting from a culture of ‘learned helplessness’, where staff were not empowered to raise risks early, to a culture where we encourage people to speak up and take action.”

“In fact, many of the improvements already identified and actioned from the recent reports around value for money have come directly from staff speaking up.”

Many of the report’s recommendations share similarities with those made in later reports, and actions already taken, the spokesperson said.

These included considering refinements to the Alliance Partnership operating model, and resetting the focus and scope of the Alliance to run frontline network maintenance and operations.

The reset involved implementing a new performance framework, making sure the teams are well placed to focus solely on operations and maintenance of the network, and increasing efficiencies.

“We have already seen improvements – in December 2024, our response times to jobs were the lowest since the Alliance was established five years ago.”

The paper for next week’s meeting disclosed the company’s inability to complete its own list of recommendations before the new water entity takes over.

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