DUP welcomes Sinn Fein minister's decision to call in forensic accountants to NI Water - but questions party's record

However, Deborah Erskine has also said there are “real concerns about the effectiveness of oversight” by Sinn Fein’s infrastructure ministers, and the public “deserves transparency and accountability”.

Her comments come after Liz Kimmins announced her intention to send in forensic accountant services to investigate the reasons why NI Water has been unable to live within its budget.

The Sinn Fein minister said that despite a current allocation of just over £152million, the board of NI Water “has indicated in writing that it is minded to instruct NI Water to overspend unless additional budget is available”.

The overspend is expected to be in the region of £3m. Ms Kimmins said that she fully understood the “budgetary management decisions that NI Water has taken this year that have led to the board of NI Water proposing this unprecedented and disappointing course of action”.

But she said engaging forensic accountants was “a necessary step” which would help her department “work in partnership together with NI Water and enable better planning going forward in these times of constrained budgets”.

DUP MLA Deborah Erskine says it is important that the minister “gets to grips with spending within NI Water” to restore public confidence in financial management of both the Department and NI Water.

Ms Erskine, who chairs the Assembly’s Infrastructure Committee, said: “The public rightly want funding to be spent appropriately. This is a significant step that the Minister has taken but lessons must be learnt.

“The fact that NI Water has exceeded its budget by approximately £3 million raises serious questions about the management of public funds within the organisation. Overspending has grave consequences for all Government Departments.

“The Department for Infrastructure, under Minister Liz Kimmins, must get to grips with this situation. There are real concerns about the effectiveness of oversight by Sinn Fein’s DfI Ministers, and the public deserves transparency and accountability

“This investigation is a necessary step, but it should not have taken external intervention for these issues to be addressed. The funding concerns are nothing new and well known to the Committee and the public. To introduce this measure in the dying days of the financial year, shows the lack of decisive action to date.

“The Minister must ensure robust financial controls are in place and that this situation is not repeated.

“There are significant challenges to ensuring the appropriate funding of our water system. The people of Northern Ireland rely on NI Water for a critical public service. They deserve assurance that their money is being managed properly, and that failings are being tackled, not ignored.”

Asked about the minister’s move, NI Water said only that it “will be working with DfI in line with minister’s instructions”.

Ulster University Senior Economist Esmond Birnie has raised concerns about the “extraordinary” situation at NI Water.

He told the News Letter on Tuesday: “If it is the case that the Board of the public body have decided they ‘must’ over-spend then that is very unusual . Boards of public bodies have to take very seriously their duty to keep within budgets . If NI Water is doing otherwise that suggests to me that they have concluded that in this case failure to spend will place them in breach of some legal obligation, for example re environmental standards.

“Whatever the merits of use of forensic accountants some of us have felt that for decades now the fundamental problem… remains the absence of domestic water charges. At the moment we are seeing a lot of attempts to square the circle which will almost certainly prove futile. Similarly recent proposals for ‘developer contributions’ will not resolve the basic funding problem”.

UUP finance spokesperson Steve Aiken has said that the legal set up of NI Water means that the minister of infrastructure and her department are “legally required, by the regulator, to support clean water and sewage”.

He said minutes of a NI Water board meeting show concerns that they don’t have the resources to meet their health and safety obligations –- obligations. he says, that the minister is legally required to meet.