Mr. Jerry Grant:

The purpose of an individual meter is to measure. When one measures flow to a house, one can use that information for a variety of purposes. The decision to meter in Ireland was obviously a Government decision with the intention of supporting user-based charges to begin with. In the meantime, we have focused on the other benefits from using meters in terms of supporting the operation of our business. An awful lot of the information points to the fact that a relatively small amount of households use a huge amount of water. For example, we now know that 1% of households use over 20% of all of the water supplied to households. We also know that 5% of households use a third of the water supplied to households. Due to having a leak alarm on individual meters, we also know that about 7% of houses have continuous night flows that are very indicative of leaks. We have been able to target the proportion of leakage that is on the household side more directly through the first fix scheme. To date, we have achieved considerable success in terms of saving water on that front.

District meters are a completely different piece of the infrastructure. They are designed to determine the amount of water supplied to a region or area. In rural areas one might have 50 premises on a district meter because of the length of pipes. In towns and cities it tends to be more like 1,000 to 1,500 premises. The Republic of Ireland has 4,407 district meters compared with 3,072 in Scotland. Therefore, we are very well covered in terms of district metering. In 2014, our problem was that about 50% of the district meter infrastructure was not working as it had not been maintained over the previous four or five years. We have got a lot of the problem sorted out. We are installing a leakage management system that will provide headquarters with live data from all of the meters, thus allowing us to plan our district meter programme.

In broad terms, we distribute 1.7 billion litres of water every day with roughly 600 million litres ending up with households, roughly 300 million litres ending up in non-domestic operation and other uses and about 765 million litres or 45% is lost in leakage on the public side.

The big issue with leakage is undoubtedly on the public side. That is where the district meters are crucial and it is where the sustained effort over the next ten to 20 years will be required to bring it down to the levels other countries have achieved. On the domestic side, approximately 170 million litres of the 600 million litres appear to be leakage, based on what the district meters are telling us. That is the distinction between those two.

In terms of what is excessive usage, the guide or the information I can provide to the committee comes back to the fact that approximately 7% of households typically on a read - in other words, approximately 55,000 of a typical 800,000 reads in a quarter - show the leak alarm. The statistics show that 5% are using one third of all the water. Clearly, there is very significant usage at the top end of the usage curve.

On the question about conservation and driving behaviour, that information is telling us that the fundamental gain is around stopping the leakage and encouraging or helping households to fix leaks. The gains that will be made by means of behavioural change in terms of basic consumption are much lower than that, because when we exclude the 7% that are currently showing leaks the other 93% are only using approximately 110 litres per person, which is very comparable with the northern European figures. We are not in a bad place where the vast majority of people are concerned. Conservation is very much about the houses that have leaks, whether inside the house or under the driveway or garden.

In the context of apartment blocks, the most logical and straightforward thing to do would be to have a bulk meter and use some type of aggregate allowance. It is extremely difficult to meter individual apartments. There are some that are constructed in such a way that one could do it, but the vast majority are very difficult and we do not see it being a feasible option anytime soon. Bulk metering certainly would work and that would also catch water that might be used around the site.

Those are the main points I wish to make.