Green policies get bogged down

On the day when it also emerged that the proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs might contravene EU regulations, the government has used a classic late Friday news dump to ensure the row over water charges for schools will continue to rumble. The issue is the clarification issued for Bertie Ahern’s pre-Christmas declaration that schools already having received water bills should “hold on to them for now”. That just meant — till we figure out how much they should actually pay.

One little detail in the announced schedule of water charges, which will be on a per-student basis until metering is introduced in 2010 is that all schools are being billed €3/student for 2007 in addition to prospective charges of €3.50 for this year and €4 for 2009. Some schools may be suprised to learn of the retroactive liability, at least those which didn’t already get a bill for 2007 (where the previous bill exceeds the new calculation, the school gets to pay the lower calculation).

Nevertheless, the initial impression has to be these charges are very low. Think about it this way; you’d get bottled water for about a week for the entire per-year per-student charge. So it will be interesting to see the calculation that this scheme satisfies –

The legal advice also confirms that they [schools] will be required to pay the full cost of water services used by them on a metered basis, with effect from 1 January 2010. The Directive also requires that measures are put in place up to 2010 to move towards full cost recovery.

The implementation of the new scheme is a good example of non-joined up government, as it requires interaction between the departments of education and local government, along with the cash-starved local governments themselves, and the even more cash-starved school boards. One key detail has to be to give schools some information on what their 2010 metered charges will be. Surely Bertie is not so clever and cunning as to dump such a problem onto his successor?

But the deeper issue that these institutional water charges are a sideshow compared to the exemption from water charges of residential users. It is that gap which means that there are no conservation incentives at your own tap, that there’s no pricing of the growing problems with water quality due to depletion and pollution of the water table, and that water infrastructure has to be financed on a cap-in-hand basis rather than from steady cash flow to stand-alone water utilities.