NI Water: Bad Debt and Customer Services Operating Expenditure 2019-2020

NI Water's Annual Information Return for 2019-2020 details outstanding revenue from bad debt and a breakdown of customer services operating expenditure. The dataset, published under an open government license, provides a financial snapshot of a public water utility's debt recovery and service costs. Its cross-platform presence on UK and EU open data portals indicates its use for public sector accountability.

Use Cases

• Analyzing bad debt trends in public utilities based on outstanding revenue figures.
• Benchmarking customer service operational costs against other utilities using expenditure breakdowns.
• Assessing financial performance and accountability of a state-owned water provider.

Strengths

• Published under the Open Government Licence (OGL-UK-3.0), facilitating reuse.
• Cross-platform availability on eu_open_data and uk_data suggests established provenance.
• Covers a specific fiscal period (2019-2020) for a named public utility, Northern Ireland Water.

Limitations

• Column names and a precise row count are not provided in any source, limiting understanding of granularity.
• Metadata for size, rows, and author is consistently missing or listed as 'unknown' or 'None'.
• The 'last updated' date of 2026-07-08 appears inconsistent with the dataset's 2019-2020 content.

Provenance

Source

Government Digital Service (via eu_open_data platform)

Collection Method

Likely an official regulatory submission (Annual Information Return) by Northern Ireland Water.

Time Range

2019-2020

Freshness

Last updated metadata is 2026-07-08 13:33:06.914665, though this may refer to platform refresh rather than data content.

Geography

Northern Ireland, United Kingdom