Wellington Water reveals $1.3m communications budget kept under wraps

Tuesday, 25 November 2025

Water bubbles up from the footpath in Johnson St, Wellington. The incident in June this year just one of the many problems Wellington Water has faced.

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Wellington Water has disclosed the extent of its reliance on consultants and contractors, admitting to a $1.3 million communications budget that senior management had kept under wraps.

And, when the fiasco of contractors over-charging broke earlier in 2025, who did it call? An external communications contractor.

The about-to-shut, council-owned Wellington Water has responded to a Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA) request for the cost of its internal and external communications budget.

The same request in 2024 showed an annual bill of $921,000. Now, Wellington Water has confirmed senior management gave the direction not to ask for the cost of all contracted communications companies. Once disclosed it added about $500,000 to the bill.

But the transparency only goes so far - Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty would not say who specifically gave the direction, saying it came from senior management and was before his time.

“My understanding of the LGOIMA is that when you ask a question, we only have to use the information we hold … We didn't hold that information,” he said.

The use of the “consultant panel” – a closed shop of contractors which self-appointed jobs – came crumbling down with two reports out earlier in 2025 showing it resulted in Wellington Water paying over-the-odds for work done.

Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty has revealed how reliant the organisation was on outside help with consultants managing consultants.

Dougherty said Wellington Water was overcharged about $10m by contractors – through Wellington Water had refused to do a full analysis. Some jobs were now 20 to 30% cheaper thanks to competitive tendering but also the fact contractors were dropping bids due to a lack of work.

The LGOIMA response revealed that Wellington Water used an outside communications company, PQC, to manage the fallout from the debacle.

Dougherty said he had no regrets for using contractors to do communications on the contractor fallout.

As a result of the consultant panel fallout, Wellington Water brought all communications in house. But it boosted internal communications staff in the last two years from nine to 14, and with it the internal budget from $938,000 to $1.3m.

In the previous three years, $1.28m was spent on external public relations contractors for projects and a further $19,588 on external PR agencies for advice. It was out of this that PQC was used to help with communications around the contractor charging fiasco.

Latitude won the vast majority of the contracted communications work and a statement from the company said it was proud of the work done, including community engagement.

It questioned Wellington Water claims that, had it not brought communications in-house, it would have spent $1.4m to $1.6m this year on external communications. (Wellington Water did not include this in its statement but later confirmed it was in an earlier draft statement).

Meanwhile, Dougherty on Monday revealed just how reliant on outside help Wellington Water previously was.

“We would have a consultant managing a project for us, and normally you would have a staff member who would be looking over the consultant's shoulder, but we would engage another consultant to look over their shoulder on our behalf. So we had a consultant managing a consultant for a project.

“And then when they wanted to talk with the community on our behalf, they would go to Latitude, and then we would have another consultant.”