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OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Committee for Infrastructure OFFICIAL REPORT (Hansard) Briefing by Waterways Ireland 14 April 2021 NORTHERN IRELAND ASSEMBLY Committee for Infrastructure Briefing by Waterways Ireland 14 April 2021 Members present for all or part of the proceedings: Miss Michelle McIlveen (Chairperson) Ms Martina Anderson Mr Roy Beggs Mr Cathal Boylan Mr Keith Buchanan Mrs Dolores Kelly Ms Liz Kimmins Mr Andrew Muir Witnesses: Mr Joe Gillespie Waterways Ireland Mr John McDonagh Waterways Ireland Mr Joe McMahon Waterways Ireland The Chairperson (Miss McIlveen): John, you are very welcome to the Committee, along with Joe. Please make your presentation, and then members will follow up with some questions. Mr John McDonagh (Waterways Ireland): Thank you very much. Good morning, Chair and members. My name is John McDonagh. I am the chief executive of Waterways Ireland. I am joined today by two colleagues: Joe Gillespie, who is our Northern regional manager, and Joe McMahon, who is our technical services director. We propose to take you through the presentation content on a page-by- page basis. That is on the basis that you have it, and you can refer to the page numbers at the bottom. I will start with the first section, to give you a little bit of background about who we are and what we do. Then we are going to move into a section in the middle that has lots of pictures, which we will move through pretty quickly, and what we hope to do there is to give you a sense of perspective around the projects, delivery and maintenance etc across our navigations since 2016. The reason for that is that we understand that you have not had a presentation since 2016, so we are obviously going to try to move through five years pretty quickly. Towards the end, we have a couple of slides about the now and the future, which I am happy to take you through. That is how we hope to proceed, so if you are comfortable with that — I am going to assume that you are — I am going to take you first through page 3, which is called 'About Waterways Ireland'. I will spend a moment on this. We are the largest of the six implementation bodies established under the British-Irish Agreement in 1998, and we are a cross-border navigation authority. We are responsible for over 1,000 kilometres of navigable waters, and the remit that we have is for the 1 management, maintenance, development and promotion of those 1,000 kilometres, principally for recreation purposes. I direct you to the map on the right-hand side of the slide, which shows you where the waterways are within our remit. Starting at the top, number 1 is the Lower Bann; number 2 is the Erne system; number 3 is the Shannon Erne system, stretching the whole way down to number 4, which is the Shannon; number 5 is the Royal canal; number 6 is the Grand canal; and number 7 is the Barrow navigation. I am pausing just to give you time to understand that that is the remit for the locations of the waterways. We employ 300 permanent staff across different offices and sites that are close to the navigations themselves, and we complement and increment those numbers with seasonally recruited staff, which reflects the kind of seasonality of the job that we have. Our headquarters are here in Enniskillen, where I am today. We have regional offices in Carrick-on-Shannon, Dublin and Scarriff. Last year, approximately three and a half million people used our waterways in some capacity, either on-water or off-water. Annually, we create social, economic and environmental well-being value of €560 million. The current valuation of the rebuild costs of our infrastructure assets is estimated at €1 billion. If you have time and you are inclined, you can find out more about us by clicking on our website. I am going to take you from slide 3 to slide 4 and cover our governance structure. Ultimately, the authority that we report to is the North/South Ministerial Council (NSMC), which is assisted by the secretariat in Armagh. We have two sponsor Departments: the Department for Infrastructure in Northern Ireland, with Minister Nichola Mallon, and, in Ireland, the Department for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, with Minister O'Brien and Minister Noonan. In the Waterways Ireland structure, we have a chief executive, me; an accounting officer, again, me; and an audit committee with an independent chair, who is called Kieran Kelly. That is our governance structure. On slide 5, we have tangible and intangible assets. I am not going to spend too much time on this one. The left-hand side shows that the physical assets that we talked about earlier are valued at about €1 billion. They run across about 20 principal assets, which are pure infrastructure assets: everything from bridges to culverts to lock gates. We have financial assets, which are assets funded by the Government, Executive or third parties, and then the income that we generate ourselves. As I said earlier, we have 300 permanent staff, and they are dispersed across two different jurisdictions. We have different currencies, services, policies and terms and conditions, so there is a certain amount of complexity. We have an intangible asset in the brand, the corporate reputation and the know-how, or what I call the "expertise core competency". Slide 6 gives a sense of the operating framework. We have a requirement to engage with multiple key stakeholders. At the top, we have the North/South Ministerial Council, and, coming down, we have the sponsor Departments, Finance Departments, trade unions from an industrial relations perspective and then, obviously, our own people. That gives a sense of the environment. I will spend a moment on page 7, because it is a little bit busy. It tries to give a sense of some history and what we are doing. On the left-hand side, we show our maintenance and capital spend from 2010- 2020. We have rebased 2010 to 100 to show the trend across the 10 years. On the left-hand side, both lines significantly decline from 2010, particularly around 2014-15, when our capital funding was very significantly reduced. Both of the lines then came back from 2016, 2017 and 2018 onwards to around 70% of the 2010 number. In latter times, in 2019-2020 and actually continuing into 2021, there has been some small incremental growth in funding. That puts it in perspective for maintenance and capital. On the right-hand side, the slide is looking at this through a different set of eyes. This is an international benchmark comparator with the organisations mentioned there. It looks at our total expenditure, measured per kilometre of navigations, to actually have a common benchmark. The range of expenditure runs from €31,000 per kilometre in our case up to €151,000 per kilometre for Scottish Canals. The average is €113,000 per kilometre, so we are significantly off the benchmark number. On slide 8, the format is somewhat similar again, looking at resources or numbers of people here. On the left-hand side, the slide indicates a red line along the top, which is called a remit target. We were remitted from way back at the start, 20 years ago, to have 381 permanent resources. We have never had 381, certainly not since 2010. The numbers are along the bars there. They dipped down to 277 in 2017. In the last couple of years in particular, we have been beginning to rebuild capacity in the organisation. 2 Again, the right-hand side looks at this from the perspective of what I call "international benchmarks". It compares the number of employees across the length of the navigations within the responsibility of each navigation authority. We have 0·3 of an employee per kilometre. The average across them all is 0·5, and it actually reaches out to 1·1 in Scottish Canals. Again, from a resource perspective, in terms of the number of employees, there are very significant gaps. Slide 9 gives some insight into the money, as I call it. Again, at the bottom, we are looking at 2016 through to 2021. The very last number at the bottom shows the current total. You can see that, in 2016, the funding was €23·246 million. That has been growing in latter years, and our funding now is at €27·758 million. The top half of the slide, on the right-hand side, shows current funding, which is based on the proportion and allocation, or apportionment, of waterways in each jurisdiction. In simple language, 85% of the waterways are in Ireland and 15% are in Northern Ireland. The current funding is provided from the Departments based on that apportionment, so we get 15% of our current funding from Northern Ireland and 85% from Ireland. The left-hand side of the slide, at the top, shows capital funding, which is different. Capital funding is allocated on the basis of where the project actually happens, so, as you can see, over the years, it moves around a little bit depending on the capital programme in either jurisdiction. Regarding slide 10, I did not want to make the presentation and not make a reference to COVID. Simply put, we have had a COVID project team in place from the start; in other words, for over approximately 15 months now. The project team meets regularly and makes decisions in relation to COVID for all our staff. We moved our office-based staff to homeworking around 23 March 2020, so over a year ago at this stage.
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