The Havelock North water supply debacle

So just how competent are local authorities?

OPINION: The report on the Havelock North water supply is out now and predictably there is a prevailing theme that this is a systemic failure – no officials have been held directly accountable and it appears that the mayor, who is politically the most accountable of those involved, is actually a candidate for parliament for the next election.  How bizarre as they say!! To make it worse it was not an isolated incident – there seem to have been similar problems before. I sympathise entirely with affected residents who are aiming for compensation.

However, to me the whole episode begs the question of local authority competence in general – it this just an isolated instance or is the occurrence of such incidents (not necessarily with water supply) a characteristic of the sector.

I should say immediately that there are some very competent people working in the sector and I know some of them myself.  And I must say I have had some very good experiences in dealing with local authorities – but I have also had some very bad experiences.  I think that the Kaikoura experience coming on top of the Christchurch and leaky buildings experience has had a perverse effect as well – perverse in the sense that it has made officials very fussy about following the rules whether they make sense or not (people are regularly driven mad by this!) while not necessarily providing the practical follow-up that gives the rules any bite.  Some of the follow-up work that occurred in Christchurch, for example, was just appallingly bad.  Effective follow-up is one of the keys to making rules both effective and more sensible,

I don’t think the health and safety legislation has helped this either.

What is needed is a commitment to the review of practices which results in real action and not just a “we must do better” reaction. The driving force for this has to be middle and senior management and it has got to include “on the ground” checks so what is being done can be verified.

One of the danger points in all of this is the change of staff.  With the change of staff – and it is occurring all the time for good reason in most cases – comes a loss of commitment and even more importantly a loss of corporate knowledge. The only wat to combat this is to have good systems for not only retaining important knowledge but ensuring it is passed along to the next tranche of staff, in terms of both content and importance.

Government agencies of all types used to be good at this because if things were not written down they just disappeared.  Public servants of an older generation will be familiar with what used to the called the “desk file”.  But modern technology had made us much more careless about things like that. It is not so much a lack of recording of information – it is more a matter of finding what had been recorded amongst the pile of other information “on the system”.

I think too we need to be more alert to what I call “near misses”, i.e. cases which would have been a disaster but for a bit of luck or a critical system holding up under pressure better than expected.  The trouble again is that near misses simply do not attract attention because there is too much else to so.

One solution is to be more systematic so when a near miss occurs there is documented evidence on:

• Why it was a near miss
• What needs to be corrected or made surer as a result
• How serious the consequences would have been if it had been a real disaster and not a near miss.

But I guess none of this is likely to change anything without the commitment of key people to making changes.  And that is the real disaster of the Havelock North incident and report. Yes, it will be read, and yes changes will be made as a result – but without commitment, the probability is that it will be pigeonholed as an isolated incident and general practices will gradually drift back to where they have always been.

By Bas Walker

This is another of Bas Walker’s posts on GrownUps.  Please look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.