Mr. John Dempsey:

In response to Deputy Ó Broin's point, the €70 million per annum in operational efficiencies that Mr. Quinn referenced earlier refers to payroll and related savings in overhead costs which we project will arise from an operational headcount reduction of approximately 850 staff. To explain how we arrived at that number, there was the equivalent of roughly 4,300 staff working in water services at the end of 2017. That was the total of both Irish Water and local authority staff. That figure breaks down into 3,500 local authority staff and just under 800 Irish Water staff. That 4,300 staff equivalent represents approximately 5,000 people because quite a number of people in local government work on water services part of the time and work in other service areas for the rest. There are in the region of 1,200 to 1,300 people who do not spend all their time working on water.

The Deputy is right; once we fully implement the single public utility we expect to be able to operate with a reduced workforce of 3,300. However, that would be after a number of years. This is a complex project which must be carried out on a managed phased basis. Part of managing that transition is making sure that the people who will be working in water services will be better supported in how they do their work. Their work will be reorganised to better effect in order to take advantage of scale and consistency but people will also be better supported in terms of training and equipment. It is a reduction of 1,000 from where we are today, but it will happen over a period of time and it will be managed.

It is important to restate what Mr. Grant and Mr. Quinn have said. There will be no compulsory redundancies. We are not talking about job losses. We see that we can achieve this reduction over a number of years. Factors like retirement, normal staff turnover, voluntary redundancy and redeployment to other local authority service areas which have resourcing requirements will come into play. These are all quite realistic and tangible benefits over the time period we are talking about. It can be seen materialising. As I said, 850 of the 1,000 reduction in staff numbers is on the operational headcount side. That will generate the €70 million per annum in operational efficiencies.

There were one or two other questions. The Deputy asked whether any element of this reduction related to a change in how we account for payroll costs. The short answer is "no". From our establishment in 2014, we have been following international financial reporting standards and they are very black and white as to what constitutes operational expenditure as opposed to capital expenditure. We will be continuing with that. The Deputy queried whether there would be any impact on customer service. Perhaps Mr. Grant will want to comment on that in more detail, but we believe there will not be because there will be an improvement in service through the different mechanisms we talked about. This is not being done only for the benefit of customer service. It is also absolutely essential to meeting the objectives of the national development plan and to being able to meet the demands of a growing economy. I believe they were all the questions I was going to cover.