The futility of hoping Sinn Féin will fix Northern Ireland’s water system was laid bare in the Assembly on Monday.
Liz Kimmins, the party’s infrastructure minister, ruled out a proposal from a coalition of business and construction industry groups to add a small levy to domestic rates – the North’s household property tax. This would “represent a form of water charging”, Kimmins said, so it was out of the question, a point she repeated at the urging of party colleagues.
The rates are Stormont’s only serious revenue-raising power. If they are not to be used to fund water there must be cuts elsewhere, but that is also out of the question. Instead, Kimmins demanded more money from “the British Treasury” to address “years of underinvestment by successive British governments”.
The last time this complaint might have been valid was 1989, when Northern Ireland missed out on investment and debt write-offs to fatten up water utilities in England and Wales for privatisation. Otherwise, there has always been plenty of money.
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Stormont receives enough from London to provide public services to the same standard as in England, including an allowance for Northern Ireland’s higher and more complex needs – that is the assessment of Stormont’s independent fiscal experts. Until recently, it received even more.
Northern Ireland’s households pay as little as half the property-related taxes of their UK counterparts, if water charges are counted. Scotland’s nationalised utility also levies a domestic charge.
Although the treasury has paid Stormont off in the past, patience snapped after the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. There will be no more excess funding, certainly not without some effort to cut costs or raise revenue internally, as successive northern secretaries have made clear.
Young people are rightly enraged when their homeowning elders tell them to save for a deposit by buying fewer cups of coffee
Sinn Féin is not just stuck on this point; it is going backwards. During the lengthy collapse of devolution from 2002, UK ministers plotted to introduce a domestic water charge as a prelude to privatisation.
This strongly motivated the DUP and Sinn Féin to reach the 2006 St Andrews Agreement, but their primary aim was to prevent privatisation. Both parties still acknowledged the public had to pay more for water. Sinn Féin’s plan to do this was to itemise a charge on domestic rates bills – the same idea it is now ruling out.
In the event, Sinn Féin and the DUP made do with funding Northern Ireland Water by direct subsidy. They failed to keep this up with inflation and the water system has slowly decayed. Any further consideration Sinn Féin might have given to its own idea ended in 2014 when it latched on to opposition to water charges in the Republic. It will not undermine a southern position with a northern policy.
The DUP has also been in retreat, entrenching executive dysfunction. While Sinn Féin controls the departments responsible for water and the rates, both main parties must agree to any major policy changes in practice. The DUP liked to present itself as more financially responsible when it was the largest party and would occasionally entertain new funding ideas, even if it was counting on Sinn Féin to block them.
Since dropping to second place it has become more risk-averse and populist, until its policy – or non-policy – on funding water is hard to distinguish from Sinn Féin’s
A failing water system causes insidious, disastrous damage to the economy and the environment. The impact on house-building alone has calamitous social effects. This has raised unionist fears of republicans wanting Northern Ireland to fail.
However, that is a simplistic and paranoid analysis, especially with Sinn Féin lauding its new leadership role at Stormont. Sinn Féin wants itself to succeed, an outcome it considers indistinguishable from its constitutional goal – l’etat, c’est ourselves alone. Yet all the thinking and strategising it puts into this boils down to its own simplistic fear of losing votes.
Kimmins told the assembly she will not be “adding a financial burden to households that are already struggling”. The “burden” in the latest proposal is £65 (€74.60) a year on average, ranging from £23 for small houses to £204 for the most expensive. Social housing tenants and households on benefits would be exempt.
Young people are rightly enraged when their homeowning elders tell them to save for a deposit by buying fewer cups of coffee.
If the better-off half of Northern Ireland’s population handed over the equivalent of one cup of coffee a month, in the form of a progressive wealth tax, there would be new houses to buy at lower prices, more and better jobs and a cleaner environment.
This need not be an all-Ireland policy, as political circumstances in the North and Republic are different, even if the plight of young people is the same.
Why is Sinn Féin not embracing this message, let alone running away from it? It’s pathetic.
