Irish Water criticises ‘leaks’ on plan to deduct water bills from wages

Leaks from within Government about proposed legislative changes which would allow Irish Water deduct unpaid charges from people's wages or social welfare payments have been described as unhelpful by a spokeswoman for the controversial utility.

"I don't know how it happened but it is not helpful," Elizabeth Arnett said. "It is not a decision. it is just a consideration. We are not party to those discussions," she added.

“Whatever the Government decides to do we have no view,” she said.

“But we do have to make sure that there is a reason for those who pay to continue paying.”

She said that Irish Water was preparing to deal with tens of thousands of complaints from irate customers who receive error strewn bills from the utility in the coming weeks and has warned that it will take at least six months before the main bulk of problems are resolved.

While the company is confident that its billing systems are working correctly and generating accurate bills, incomplete and inaccurate information available to it will make problems inevitable, Ms Arnett warned.

However she added that a team of 750 people in its call centre was ready for a flood of calls to come in starting early next month and she expressed confidence that most of the problems associated with bills will be easy to resolve.

Starting early next month the utility will begin sending out 37,000 bills a night for an eight week period with bills covering the first three months of the year arriving through more than 1.7 million homes from April to June.

Ms Arnett said difficulties would most likely arise around determining the addresses of households with boil notices while accurately billing households with non-unique addresses is also likely to prove challenging.

“This is a brand new system and of course there are going to be errors,” she said.

“Some of them will be simple and easy to resolve but still unacceptable.”

She said that as many as 40 per cent of the addresses in the State were not unique “so there will be bills sent in error and there will be bills sent to people who are on boil water notices.

“There will be people who get a bill that they should not get but when you set up a system from scratch such errors are inevitable.”

“It is going to take a couple of bill cycles to get it right,” Ms Arnett said.

“The system is working and it is producing the right bills but if the information is wrong - and it could be - then there will be errors. “

She said that the latest data coming from its meter readings suggest that a third of users were using less than the capped charge of just under €65 a quarter for a two adult household while another 20 per cent were close to “beating the cap”.