It has been revealed that the cost of billing at Irish Water is €25 million a year.
The Oireachtas Committee on water funding has heard that saving could be made if billing is permanently scrapped.
The committee also heard that Irish Water is a high cost utility with costs double what they should be for an efficient utility.
Paul McGowan from the Commission for Energy Regulation outlined the cost of billing: “The ongoing cost is €25 million.
“Of that, €13 million is bill processing, €10 million is relating to the contact centre and there’s €2 million in terms of staff costs.
Future Funding of Domestic Water Services Committee meeting Irish Water & CER officials committee room 4 pic.twitter.com/5ToH34mlCB
— Oireachtas News (@OireachtasNews) January 12, 2017
The body responsible for regulating Irish Water insists that water metering should not be abandoned forever.
But the Commission for Energy Regulation says it thinks metering should be frozen for the moment, to free up money for elsewhere.
It says with limited funding available, money should instead be spent on repairing pipes to maintain the standard of the water supply.
But regulator Paul McGowan says the programme should resume when the money is available: “We said that ‘at this time’ there are other priorities for capital investment, but that we could come back and look at whether or not there could be a case for further metering in due course.
“But in the meantimes, there were other options that could be looked at and that was the context within which we replied to the committee.
“We did not boldly state that metering should be abandoned, we just said, ‘at this time’,” he said.
