Mr. Jerry Grant:

It is not fixed in terms of scope. The point that people miss about the SLA is that it was never meant to be a fixed measure in terms of what a local authority or Irish Water must do. Irish Water is an evolving organisation. It is building operational capacity. For example, design-build-operate, DBO, projects in local government are currently contracted out on long-term contracts. Irish Water is no longer doing that. We are breaking contracts into two, five, seven and ten years such that we can start to retake control of them when we build operational capacity. This requires us to do more regional working and to look at the skill sets we create to do certain things. The SLA allows for this.

In terms of the process in which we are currently involved, we are examining how in the context of the remaining years of the SLA we can get economic efficiencies and improvements in service and what this means for the SLA. As I said, there is a process of discussion going on with the local government sector, through the CCMA, and the Department in this regard. The degree to which we need to make changes or not will be determined in that process. It will certainly not be determined by Irish Water. There will be changes over time because we are looking at re-engineering the water industry in Ireland, raising skills levels and having less manual work on the ground and more visibility through telemetry, planning and so on. This is not about contracting out. There is no intention on the part of Irish Water to contract out work that is currently done within the public sector but we might do it differently and on a regional basis into the future. If we are to achieve the very challenging targets we have been set in terms of economic efficiency, we will need to do that.

Senator Murnane O'Connor also asked about responsibility for plumbing. Householders have always been responsible for problems in their properties. If a property is a local authority house then the local authority is responsible for maintenance of the plumbing but the householder has always been responsible for leaks on their own property. We have been offering a free first fix for leaks in, say, a driveway. It is a limited scheme but a very effective one. To date, we have fixed 28,000 leaks under our first fix scheme.