| 20 April 2022 |
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| Answer given by Mr Sinkevičius on behalf of the European Commission | ||
| Question reference: E-000859/2022 | ||
| The main objective of the Drinking Water Directive (DWD)(1) is to protect human health of all EU citizens by ensuring the availability and quality of drinking water. Portugal achieves high compliance rates with the DWD.
The DWD includes no provisions on how Member States should organise their water supply nor on how they should set their tariffs. It is Member States’ responsibility to ensure and organise water supply management. The Commission has no information on national and local price differences in relation to private versus public concessions. In January 2021, the recast DWD(2) entered into force, to be duly transposed into national laws by 12 January 2023. It has specific provisions concerning water leakage efficiency of national water supply systems. The main EU funding for water supply related investments comes from the cohesion policy programmes(3), which are the result of discussions between the Commission and the Member State. These programmes, which provide for the legal framework under which investments are to be selected by the national managing authorities, are subsequently subject to audits that ensure a proper use of these EU funds. The programmes respect the water supply management model decided by the Member State. The Common Implementation Strategy for the Water Framework Directive(4) provides the possibility to discuss the raised issues of water efficiency at expert level in various expert and working groups, also at request of the Member States’ representatives, such as possibly in the Ad Hoc Task group on Water Scarcity and the Working Group Economics. |
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| Last updated: 20 April 2022 |