‘Tap dry’

The Fair Trading Commission (FTC) is not about to back down from its decision that the financially struggling Barbados Water Authority (BWA) should not compensate customers for interruption of service although there is a standard of service in place.

This means that if the utility company breaches any of the guaranteed standards under the mandatory guaranteed and overall service metrics implemented in January last year, customers should not expect financial compensation.

Director of Utility Regulation Dr Marsha Atherley-Ikechi was responding to concerns raised by residents regarding the FTC’s suspension of the required compensatory payments under the guaranteed standards of service policy.

Atherley-Ikechi said after several rounds of discussions with the utility company the FTC had determined that based on its financial circumstance the BWA was in no position to pay.

“The regulation is such that it is dependent on and conditional on circumstances. I want to make that abundantly clear,” she said.

FTC Chairman Tammy Bryan (left) and Director of Utility Regulation Dr Marsha Atherley-Ikechi.

“One, when developing any type of policy, has to be cognizant of the environment in which they are acting, and as such it was determined that the Barbados Water Authority, given the predicament that it was in, was not in a position to be able to provide reimbursements to customers for failure to provide a certain level of service,” she explained.

Based on findings, the BWA is hard-pressed to fix between 800 and 1,200 ruptured pipes each month, which were compounded due to changes resulting from the Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) programme.

Atherley-Ikechi told reporters that the regulator did not want to impose hardship on the utility company “such that it cannot meet”, or is even further burdened in meeting its obligations.

However, she quickly pointed out that “this does not mean that the Barbados Water Authority is not held accountable for providing a certain level of service delivery.

“It is a balancing act that has to be struck and it was determined at the time that they were not in a position to be able to offer, at least in the short-term, consumers that were adversely impacted by a shortfall in their service delivery, any compensation. That continues, at this time, to be the position of the commission,” she said.

She explained that further review of the BWA, which went under the remit of the FTC in 2015, would be carried out and that the FTC would continue to monitor the situation “and when it can be determined that this position can be amended then it would”.

She insisted that currently the FTC was “between a rock and a hard place”.

“The reality at the end of the day is that we are entrusted to ensuring the public good. To do that we have to be able to bridge that gap and understand the circumstances because to do otherwise would be to put Barbadians at a significant disadvantage collectively,” she said.

“You do not want to be in a situation where the utility cannot provide the service, does not have the funds to provide the service and therefore put the health and economic well-being of the country in peril. That is not a sustainable way of doing it and therefore we took this particular position,” she maintained.

Atherley-Ikechi made it clear that because the FTC suspended the compensatory payments provision for BWA did not mean the same would be obtained for other service providers, adding that the FTC would have to examine the individual circumstance of each company.
marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb