{"id":223325,"date":"2025-06-29T06:41:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T06:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/223325\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T06:41:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T06:41:10","slug":"ni-water-who-will-pay-for-nis-infrastructure-upgrades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/223325\/","title":{"rendered":"NI Water: Who will pay for NI’s infrastructure upgrades?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month an assessment by the Fiscal Council, an independent budget watchdog, concluded that the current funding model is not fit for purpose.<\/p>\n

It added that resolving the issues will require getting new money from somewhere “even though this appears politically unpalatable”.<\/p>\n

This week the NI Chamber of Commerce and others suggested that at least some of the money should come through the rates system<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Rates are a property tax levied on households and businesses and are the main tool which the NI Executive can use to raise money.<\/p>\n

The NI Chamber report suggested a levy, of \u00a3100 on top of the current average annual rates bill of \u00a31200.<\/p>\n

It would be a proportionate levy meaning those with bigger existing bills would pay more than \u00a3100, and those with smaller bills would pay less.<\/p>\n

The Chamber chief executive Suzanne Wylie appeared on The View, BBC NI’s main political discussion show, to sell the plan.<\/p>\n

She got familiar responses from the political guests: households are already under pressure, so they can’t be the source of the additional money.<\/p>\n

The Green Party suggested additional taxes on business. <\/p>\n

The DUP said more efficiencies should be squeezed from NI Water, while the SDLP called for another review.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the Sinn F\u00e9in Infrastructure Minister, Liz Kimmins, is pressing ahead with a plan to raise money from housing developers<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this month an assessment by the Fiscal Council, an independent budget watchdog, concluded that the current funding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5011],"tags":[1144,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-223325","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-northern-ireland","8":"tag-northern-ireland","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114765292135758212","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}