The Department of Internal Affairs (the Department) is seeking to make consistent information about councils more available and accessible, to better understand issues facing the local government sector and to inform future policy advice.
This project aims to extract and analyse information on the Water Supply, Wastewater and Stormwater systems operated by councils across New Zealand utilising the range of data and information available within council documents. This is the first project by the Department that explores the use of available water infrastructure data in this manner.
The project commenced in February 2009 with the Department requesting councils and service providers to provide information to the consultants. The documentation requested included:
- long-term council community plans (LTCCPs);
- asset management plans;
- aaluation reports; and
- assessments of water and sanitary services.
Initially it was hoped that data for this project could be sourced primarily from asset management plans (which would have provided a greater level of detail. However due to a lack of availability of these across the sector, the principle source of financial information for this report was the LTTCP activity statements. Where information was not provided directly information, were available, was downloaded from council websites.
It should be noted, that at the time of preparing this report the Local Government sector was in the final stages of producing their 2009-2019 LTCCPs. Information in this report is based on the draft editions of the 2009-2019 LTCCP Activity Statements. Some of the information supporting this report may therefore have changed with the adoption of the final LTCCP.
The analysis undertaken shows some patterns in the data. The identification of these patterns, and in some instances the lack of any clear pattern, may be used to inform the direction of any further analysis and/or, data collection process.
Overall the report and the level of analysis achieved shows that the approach adopted is of value, however future work will need to access more consistent data. While some potential improvements may address more complex analysis and comparisons with other data-sets, the immediate priority should be to improve the consistency, completeness and quality of the base data.