Reporting and Benchmarking
Reporting on performance is essential for water utilities, which are natural monopolies, to provide surety and transparency to consumers as well as to satisfy regulatory requirements and allow benchmarking and competition by comparison.
In Queensland some larger Service Providers report through the National Performance Reporting framework (which is not available to smaller utilities). All service providers report to the Regulator and annual reports and Council reports. A collective approach to reporting water performance indicators was commenced by qldwater in 2008 through the SWIM program.
The SWIM website can be accessed here.
Benchmarking is common in other jurisdictions, nationally and in other countries. For example:
- NSW - Office of Water Performance Monitoring
- Tasmania - Office of the Tasmanian Economic Regulator, Performance Monitoring
- Australia - National Performance Reports
- International - IBNET, WUBA, UK Drinking Water Quality Reports
Queensland Service Providers also need to submit a number of regulatory management plans to State Agencies (e.g. Strategic Asset Management Plans, System Leakage Management Plans, Drought Management Plans, Total Water Cycle Management Plans, Drinking Water Quality Management Plans, Recycled Water Management Plans, Local Government Asset Management Plans). The rapid increase of often duplicative requirements and the associated costs of compliance for the industry led qldwater to advocate on behalf of the industry for streamlining and rationalisation of regulatory requirements.