New Zealand’s three water services – of drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater – have attracted a lot of attention in recent years.

New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), in partnership with local government, is leading a program to reform the system for delivering these services. To better understand the reform requirements and benefits, DIA engaged the Water Industry Commission for Scotland (WICS) to undertake some quantitative economic analysis of potential benefits from the reform.

Farrierswier was engaged to peer review the assumptions and methodology used by WICS and advise whether these were suitable to inform policy advice. Although there are inherent limitations with the types of analysis undertaken by WICS, we ultimately concluded that WICS’ analysis should give reasonable estimates of the potential benefits from reform in terms of direction and order of magnitude.

We are pleased to have contributed to the development of these important reform proposals.

Our report is available on DIA’s website here: https://www.dia.govt.nz/Three-Waters-Reform-Programme. The Local Government Minister’s recent press release covering WICS analysis and our review is available here: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/reports-prove-case-urgent-water-infrastructure-reform.