Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In respect of amendment No. 13, the Bill as it stands proposes that the Commission for Energy Regulation, CER, will carry out the review within 12 months of the budget. Part of it is because I do not think it will be able to get it done within a 12 month period but also because I think that water consumption will change given that people will then know that this review is happening and, therefore, if there is a longer period over which that review is undertaken, we might see reduction, leak fixes, etc., so we would get a more accurate picture at the end of the 24 months.

Amendment No. 15 is probably a more substantive one. For those of us who were members of the Joint Committee on the Future Funding of Domestic Water Services, if we dare to recollect that particular experience, one of the big disagreements involved the unit for calculating average usage. Is it the household, which was the Fine Gael position, or is it the individual, which was the Fianna Fáil position? From the way the Bill is worded, particularly this business of having a threshold of a household of four persons, there seems to be a fudge. The problem with that fudge is that it creates all sorts of anomalies so a household of five may be able to get some kind of additional allowance if this Bill goes through but a family of four, three or two will not. Therefore, it appears that a circumstance will arise where a family of three or four could be treated exactly the same as a family of one or two for the purposes of the threshold allowance, which is very significant. While I am not in favour of the Bill at all, it seems that having a per person usage right across the board so that the household calculation would be per person, whether that involves one, two, three or four households, is the only correct way to do it.

Amendment No. 16 is just a technical thing so it does not really need speaking to. It is typographical. In respect of amendment No. 17, if the CER is going to carry out the review, for us, one of the most interesting things that emerged from the Committee on the Future Funding of Domestic Water Services involved the figures we received demonstrating that average usage in terms of litres per person per day was one of the lowest in the OECD. Therefore, it is vital that this type of international comparison is included in the review of the CER. Therefore, I want that named specifically, which is amendment No. 17.