By Joe Leogue

The Government attempted “too much too soon” when it tried to introduce water charges, according to a new report on the failed efforts to implement a tariff as part of the establishment of the Irish Water utility.

The finding is one of the conclusions made by the Whitaker Institute, a NUI Galway-based organisation that yesterday hosted a conference on ‘How (Not) To Do Public Policy’.

During the conference, it presented findings on the State’s success in implementing the local property tax and failure to introduce water charges.

Jim O’Leary, senior research fellow at the Whitaker Institute and author of the report, argued that the Government’s attempt to design Irish Water in such a way that it would pass the Eurostat test — thus allowing the utility to independently borrow to finance its investment programme — was a “treacherous” policy.

That effort to classify Irish Water as a utility outside the general government sector was challenging, Mr O’Leary suggested, due to Eurostat’s “complex and elusive” classification methodology, one that was not adequately anticipated by Irish policy-makers.

The objective of passing the Eurostat test also had strong and unhelpful implications for water charges. In simple terms, it meant that the average household charge had to be higher than it would otherwise have been,” said Mr O’Leary.

Policymakers failed to appreciate the scale of the regime change being attempted “and to design a set of suitable arrangements that would have eased and lengthened the transition”.

“A sense of trying to achieve too much too soon is suggested by the approach to the tariff Structure,” said the report. “The same is true of the overall water sector reform programme.

“All in all, in examining policy on water, our reading of the evidence is that it was driven by a vision that would have been more appropriate for a 7–10 year timeframe than a 3–5 year period.”

The report said there was a “serious disconnect” between policy design and implementation unlike in the case of the local property tax, which was successfully introduced “because its design was infused with a keen awareness of the importance of anticipating implementation challenges”.

Meanwhile, UCD’s Department of Environmental Policy also launched a report yesterday on the factors influencing the failure of domestic water charges in Ireland.

The report’s authors, Peter Clinch, UCD’s professor of Public Policy, and UCD researcher Anne Pender, found that the protests against water charges were representative of 30% of all Irish households, at most.

It said the other 70% paid for water services, either as Irish Water customers, via group water schemes, or by privately funding their own wells and wastewater treatment.

The UCD report identified five factors that helped generate the opposition to such charges: whether water services are perceived as public, private, or social goods; levels of public trust in Government; personal values; ‘framing’ of water charges policy; and the timing of the introduction of water charges.

“The campaign [against charges] appears to have won the PR battle to present water services as a social good rather than an economic one and took advantage of falling trust in Government around the time of the economic crisis,” said Prof Clinch.