Editorial: Cowardly MLAs are also brazen about water-water infrastructure crisis, creating huge problems for house construction

​If you want to know how cowardly and brazen Stormont is, consider this political trend.

​For years – many years – it has been clear that more money is needed for our waste-water infrastructure.

MLAs across the spectrum simply will not tolerate water chargers, as prevail in England and Wales. But they will not consider any other ways to raise revenue for this urgent work, such as increasing the regional rate above inflation.

Then they refuse to make efficiencies in other massive areas of public expenditure, such as in health, as they have been urged to do by health experts for 25 years.

All the while, Stormont will do things such as wave through expensive public sector pay rises without ever insisting on better performance, or pointing out to the almost 80% of people who work in the private sector in NI that they are already funding lavish public sector pensions that private employees now never enjoy.

This, as explained above, is the cowardly part.

The brazen part is what happens next: housing and planning officials then rightly say that there is so much pressure on sewerage they cannot approve certain housing developments. And what then do politicians do, for example in some councils? They just over-ride that advice and approve the housing, making the waste-water system all the worse.

Our front page story today is on the huge problems this is causing for house construction. The secretary of state, Hilary Benn, has made clear he shares these concerns. Very good. But why keep bailing out Stormont irresponsibility? OK, in fairness this happens less than it once did, but the Treasury is always on hand to help with ways to fund such disgraceful local politics.

This scandal gets ever worse, and the cost of proper water infrastructure work, when it finally happens, will be all the higher, and all the more impossible.