• News
• News Archive
• Media Contact

Buying Irrigation?

There are no regulations or laws designed to enable you to buy the right to take irrigation water from bores, lakes or rivers, but some permit holders are offering to transfer their surplus allocation – for a price.  Officially water is not for sale but for the lay person, paying someone so that you can have water, looks suspiciously like buying it.  The legal issues that arise from this give a whole new meaning to the phrase “buyer beware”.

Regional councils (eg Environment Canterbury) have the role under the Resource Management Act 1991 of processing and administering the permits needed to be able to take and use water for irrigation.  They have plans containing rules and policies aimed at ensuring they do not allow more water to be taken than is actually available and that rivers and aquifers are not sucked dry, so to speak.  Examples of this are the co-called “red zones” for groundwater in Canterbury. These are areas which Environment Canterbury has calculated could run out of water if all the permit holders taking from a given groundwater zone were to take what they might reasonably be expected to under their permits. The zones are then labelled “overallocated”, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible to get a permit for a new water take to be approved in those areas.

In reality, not every permit holder uses all the water they could lawfully take under their permit.  This means that some of the water the Regional Council assesses as being taken ‘in theory’ is not missing at all.  There are ways in which the holders of that unused water can make it available to be used by someone else, but they generally do so at a price.

The Resource Management Act has no formal system for buying or selling excess water. However, it does provide for a water permit or part of a water permit to be transferred from one property to another, either permanently or for a set period, as long as this does not change the “zone” or water body (like a river) from which the water is taken.  The Regional Councils administer these transfers and generally have rules in their regional plans that require off-site water transfers to be applied for and processed in a similar way to resource consent applications. 

This means that even if someone agrees to “sell” you their excess water, you are generally not guaranteed that the Regional Council will allow the transfer.  While your chances of getting the approval for an off-site transfer are much better than approval for a new permit in an overallocated zone or water body, there is always a possibility that the transfer will be refused - for example, if the new location could interfere with a neighbour’s bores.  You would not want to pay for the water, only to discover that you cannot get the transfer approved by the Regional Council.

That said, those who are not taking any or all of the water they could take under their water permits could be pleasantly surprised by how much a transfer of the unused water could earn them.  Those in officially overallocated areas could be in for a similarly pleasant surprise by getting access to water not realistically available under a new water permit application.  But the process is not without risk.  The tricky parts are:

• Working out who has allocation they are not using fully
• Finding out whether it is in the same zone or resource area
• Drafting a transfer agreement that covers all the financial and resource consent issues
• Making sure the transfer application has all the information and details needed for approval