Victorian water businesses focus on resilience after a year of challenges
28 June 2021
Senior leaders from 18 of the state’s water businesses met with the Essential Services Commission as part of an ongoing series of industry and community roundtables.
Water businesses said while lessons were learnt in 2020, they are still being challenged in terms of frequency of extreme weather events, and population migration to the regions and urban fringe.
Commissioners heard that businesses are embedding new ways of working and supporting staff in order to better support residential and small business customers.
A number of businesses said that remaining flexible was important to ensure they are meeting the specific challenges of their regions.
Chairperson’s notes
Please note, this is a summary not a verbatim transcript.
Good morning everyone and welcome to today’s roundtable.
For those of you I have not met before, my name is Kate Symons and I am the chairperson of the Essential Services Commission.
To start, I’d like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of all of the lands we’re meeting on today and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
I would like to acknowledge the connection that Indigenous Australians hold to country and culture.
I would like to welcome you all to today’s roundtable and thank you for taking the time to come together. It’s hard to believe it’s been eight months since we last met in this forum – October last year – and thankfully we are no longer in stage 4 lockdown conditions.
I’m sure that like us, it’s been a very busy time for you.
I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the effect of the recent floods and power outages that affected many South Eastern Victorians, and the recent circuit breaker lockdown.
We know that you and many of your staff have been working long hours under challenging circumstances to support our fellow Victorians.
We know that these contributions may be as representatives of your organisations, or through formal or informal volunteer roles such the Victorian State Emergency Service.
I say thank you on behalf of the commission.
The purpose of today is to explore the continuing work we are all doing to support consumers.
I will now pass to Marcus Crudden to speak on some of the activities he and the team have been undertaking in the last little while.
What we have been hearing and seeing since the October meeting (Marcus Crudden, executive director price monitoring and regulation)
Thank you Kate.
Thank you to all businesses for providing data and participating in one-on-one interviews to enable the commission to better understand the support that is being provided by water businesses to their customers.
We recently completed a 12-month review of customer support during the pandemic. Some of the highlights include:
An increase in the number of customers now on hardship programs. The largest increase remains August last year during Melbourne’s second lockdown.
Customers have not taken up instalment plans in large numbers suggesting those customers seeking assistance are struggling with cash flow issues, as opposed to money management issues.
We’ve seen a strong uptick in the use of hardship grants – such as payment matching. In regional settings, this is five times higher than pre-pandemic levels.
We also held three water-specific better practice workshops during late 2020 to help share ideas and support sector-wide improvement.
Themes were taken from the national principles on coronavirus support – and included proactive communication, new approaches to debt collection, and support for water customers who run a small business.
I’ll now hand back to Kate to speak about the rest of our work program.
Board meetings
Thanks Marcus.
Over the past three or so months, Marcus, commissioner Rebecca Billings and I have had the pleasure of meeting with each of your boards for those businesses heading into the next pricing period for 2023.
As part of those discussions, we noted the differential impacts on businesses arising out of the pandemic, both in terms of customer impact and on the business itself.
We heard significant changes in aged debt. Others told us aged debt had not changed much.
We noted across regions and sectors that some had been hard hit and may require significant ongoing assistance.
What we have learned from the development of Getting to fair – our draft strategy to better support customers experiencing vulnerability
As many of you know, we are well along the way to developing our strategy to better support consumers experiencing vulnerability.
It’s been an 18-month process of engagement and research. During this time, we have really tried to be as inclusive of the voices of vulnerable consumers as possible.
Community panel
This included holding a community panel of 37 representative members from across the Victorian community.
All commissioners and senior executive staff took the opportunity to observe the discussion that was ably facilitated on our behalf.
Some of what was discussed was challenging to hear and gave us all food for thought. Many of you have participated in your own deliberative process so will know how:
dedicated the participants are to their own learning and accountability
profound many of the observations and reflections that are shared through the process are
challenging it is to confront the many recommendations that come out of these processes, but how critical it is to meet those commitments and to honour the time and dedication of the participants.
The community panel made eight recommendations for us to take forward and the report is now available.
We brought the panel back together this year to hear what they thought of the draft strategy. In fact, it was the first meeting we held after the release of the draft. I was pleased with the endorsement we received.
Engagement with water businesses and industry associations
But of course, this is not the extent of the engagement on the strategy.
Many of your staff were available to test some of our ideas and approaches in the early stages.
Many of you came along to the public forum early in May where we stepped through the draft strategy. Thank you again to Pat McCafferty for sharing your early thoughts on the draft at that forum.
We held a workshop on the strategy initiatives in late May, focused on prioritising the type of work that will have the most impact on consumers.
Out of this we also heard the types of challenges and opportunities your staff identified for implementation of the work over the longer term. This is feedback that the team is currently working through.
Earlier this week we received a joint submission from your industry associations. I’ve also heard from some of you directly endorsing the initiative and I thank you for your reflections and involvement in the process.
We expect to release the three-year strategy in late July and look forward to working together to achieve the intent of the strategy – much of which is common across our organisations.
Coronavirus support measures
As you are all aware, in early August 2020 we amended our codes to incorporate the national principles for coronavirus support.
We agreed these would be temporary – and we have committed to review the need for the national principles along the way.
We expect some areas such as small business support and proactive communication will be rolled into the code, but this will not occur for some time.
Coronavirus support measures currently
In the meantime, the end of JobKeeper and JobSeeker led to some change in how the national principles function.
We recognise that in their current form, the national principles don’t ban restrictions and collection. Under the framework these can happen.
However, we expect businesses to follow all the processes in the code to ensure consumers experiencing financial stress are not restricted or have debt referred.
We acknowledge there are challenges where customers are not engaging. Businesses should look at emerging practice and share approaches on how to address this – and I know many of you have been doing so.
We also expect businesses to be cautious in their approach and ensure restrictions are only applied as a matter of last resort.
Further to this, when lockdowns are in place, we would expect any restriction will cease, taking into account that people affected by ‘stay at home’ orders are more reliant on their connection to essential services. Also, people who are self-isolating may not be easy to identify.
We would encourage businesses to work with government to understand government expectations during and outside lockdown periods.
Coronavirus support measures in the future
Moving forward with the national principles, and what this might look like for the code, our approach will be informed by a range of matters.
As a cross sector regulator, we will be informed but not governed by what is happening in other regulated essential services, and nationally.
We will be paying very close attention to what is happening within the water sector. Including:
what we hear through the interviews with your staff
what we learned of your approaches through the 2020 better practice workshop series
what we see through monitoring of the weekly data.
We are routinely looking to hear from industry, government and community stakeholders about what is happening on the ground.
Exploration of views on coronavirus support measures
This brings me to the discussion we’d like to have with you.
We’d like to hear your thoughts and reflections on the continuing impact of the pandemic and any other matters that are affecting your business and your communities.
The group participated in a 60-minute discussion on a range of questions.
While discussion started on the theme of coronavirus support measures, it turned to the broader challenges 2021 is presenting in terms of natural disasters and population movement away from metropolitan Melbourne.
Participants identified that we are seeing more frequent and more extreme weather events, noting recent storms, floods, and the summer bushfires of 2019-20 as examples. Many in the community are at greater risk of vulnerability, or chronic vulnerability, due to the long-term consequences of these events. Participants talked about the many ways organisations were going the extra mile to support people to cope with the immediate effects in recovery.
While population movements to the regions and urban fringe are being seen as a source of optimism, they are also presenting challenges in terms of housing affordability for people already on low incomes.
Some positives arising from 2020 included greater coordination with government and other support services to respond to sudden and unexpected events. Additionally, relationships with small business customers improved due to greater efforts to engage. Businesses that identified new ways of working during 2020 are looking to embed these approaches and find new ways to support staff.
Overall, participants agreed that greater clarity in what regulators and government expect of water businesses is desirable, but this should not be at the expense of flexibility. The observation was made that not all people or communities are seeing the same impacts of the pandemic and water businesses need to be able to respond to this variation, particularly where they are aware of strong community expectation on their role.
In closing
On behalf of the commission, I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to you all for joining us today.
I’ve found the discussion very valuable, particularly your thoughts and reflections on coronavirus support measures and the impacts you are each experiencing.
While it looks like another busy year ahead, I know the team is looking forward to continuing open and positive dialogue that has marked the relationship between our organisations to date.
