Commission set on Government implementing water charges

The European Commission is determined that households must be charged for water, despite continuing opposition from the Government, a Commission official confirmed yesterday.

The Commission's director of environmental quality and natural resources, Mr Grant Lawrence, told a conference in Dublin that the issue of full cost recovery for water usage would come to a head in mid-September when a new water directive is due to come before the European Parliament again, before its full adoption by the end of the year.

In a keynote address to the conference at University College Dublin, attended by 1,200 scientists working on aquatic environments, Mr Lawrence said the issue should not be interpreted as a Commission versus Ireland confrontation, as other EU states had reservations and consumers in some did not pay the full cost of their water.

A key element of the new directive, nonetheless, was full cost recovery of supply "to promote an awareness of the need to use water in a sustainable way", he told the International Association of Limnology meeting.

"The idea remains, but there is no obligation to charge at this stage. It remains to be seen what the European Parliament does in the second week of September."

It should be noted, he said, the extent to which charges were be ing applied in many member-states. In Britain, they were based on house value but increasingly meters were being installed. In parts of Germany, there were freshwater meters measuring what went into a house and wastewater meters measuring what came out of it.

While the Council of Ministers has backed off on the issue with the Government indicating there was no way it could conceive of domestic charges, the Commission would continue to seek full cost-recovery for industrial, agricultural and domestic water use, Mr Lawrence added.

Charges were a key part of radical EU water policy reform; the result of the realisation that water "is a shared problem". Dumping raw sewage into the North Sea and Atlantic was a British and Irish tradition which, thankfully, was coming to an end. Change stemmed from the realisation that the Atlantic was not an Irish sea and eventually pollution went beyond an individual state, he said.

With change came shared resolution, reflected in trans-national success in rehabilitating the river Rhine where salmon were now travelling up as far as Cologne and by 2000 would be throughout the system.

Water reform was needed because of reliance on scientific indicators and technology from the late 1970s. The directive had to address new issues and concerns, such as the effects of persistent organic pesticides and endocrine disrupters, which affect the hu man hormonal system, increasingly occurring in water.

In general, tap water throughout the EU was safe to drink, Mr Lawrence said, though the directive would lay down limit values for protection of human health, largely based on World Health Organisation guidelines. There have been many problems in setting levels, notably in relation to lead - the difficulty went beyond health considerations because many cities like Dublin had extensive lead piping in their networks.

The new directive seeks to define good water quality and applies to both surface and ground waters. It also addresses issues of quantity. It was likely that water extraction licences would come into force to further ensure sustainable use, he said.

All waters would have to "achieve good status" in ecological terms within a fixed period. The Commission wanted a deadline of 2010 but the Council had pushed this back to 2013.