Williams was originally appointed after an independent report commissioned by the WCC chief executive in December 2019 found that the relationship between the two entities was lacking trust, and that the management services agreement had remained unsigned for over three years.

In March 2021, a Director of Wellington Water stated that the company was in dangerous spiral, where the pressure on resources caused by continuing failures was taking funding away from new investment.

However, for some of the towns in the Kāpiti Coast and Wairarapa regions, there have been occasional non-conformances with the required standards for drinking water quality and safety.

[20] In December 2020, Audit New Zealand criticised Wellington Water for weaknesses in their non-financial performance indicators, including inability to accurately report the number of complaints about water supply, stormwater or wastewater, or accurately report the number of dry weather sewage overflows.

The Cabinet paper referred to two key challenges of affordability and capability that are facing New Zealand's three waters service delivery.

There was specific reference to Wellington Water as an example of one approach to service delivery that had successfully built capability through the scale of operations.

However, the paper also noted that Wellington Water has no ability to make trade-offs between operating and capital expenditure, nor can it cross-subsidise between owners or ratepayers in different districts.

It is expected that by mid-2024, the people employed by Wellington Water, and the asset knowledge held by the business will have transitioned to the new entity.

[26] In June 2020, there was criticism from a city councillor that Wellington Water had engaged a market research company Colmar Brunton to gather feedback from stakeholders.

There was widespread criticism, and Wellington Water announced it would be holding an independent inquiry into the cause of the failures and why it had provided misleading information.