The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Water and Sewerage Corporation (WSC) is aiming to focus solely on its “core function” once it transfers economic regulation to the Utilities Regulation and Competition Authority (URCA), and the Ministry of the Environment assumes its environmental regulatory powers.

Glen Laville, the Corporation’s general manager, told Tribune Business it was in the final stages of awarding a contract for a consultant, who will draft the blueprint for overhauling the water industry’s legislative regime and transferring economic regulation to URCA.

“We’re in the final stages of awarding the contract for the consulting services,” Mr Laville said.

“Under that, what we will be doing is the legislation, the by-laws, the guidelines for URCA to take over economic regulations, and to strip the Corporation of all its environmental regulatory powers and put all of them in the Ministry of the Environment under an independent regulator.

“What we want to achieve at the end of that is that the Corporation is just a service provider, and be regulated by URCA and the environmental regulator, so that we can concentrate on or core function, which is the provision of Water and Sewerage services.”

Mr Laville said the Corporation was eying a three to five-year turnaround, and was already witnessing the success of its non-revenue water project being undertaken by Miya.

“Last year was the very first year of the execution phase. At the early part of last year we had a lot of water rationing, and even coming down to the second to third quarter we had a lot of that happening,” said Mr Laville.

“We are now at the point where we pretty much have a 24/7 supply. We still have customers who complain, but those are isolated complaints. Right now production is easily meeting what the demand in the system is.”

Mr Laville added: “The water losses are going down. The sales are going up. That means that as we move through this year going into next year, we expect to see more revenue. We expect to see a reduction in our expenses, but this is just one component of the whole IDB programme and the whole action plan for the Corporation.

“This year we are also going to be looking at our waste water services. We are also going to be addressing regulatory reform for the sector, and we also have some institutional strengthening issues we will deal with internally like organisational restructuring.”

Mr Laville said the Corporation was still heavily dependent on government subsidies. “We still have a lot of losses every year,” he added.

“We still depend very heavily on government for subsidies. Even while we make our progress in the level of service and quality of service, as well as the infrastructure works, it took a long time for the Corporation to reach this point, so this is not something that’s going to happen overnight.

“It is a long-term project. There are some medium-term activities that we are doing, and we will have some medium-term results, but in terms of seeing ourselves off the Government subsidies, that is going to take some time.

“Right now we are targeting a three-five year turnaround. With the way the non-revenue water project is going right now, we anticipate that if we can do everything we want to do we will have a very positive result for the Corporation.”