What are developer contributions for headworks?
Developer contributions for water supply and sewerage headworks (headworks) are a charge on development to pay for their ‘fair share’ of the establishment cost of infrastructure required to service that development. These charges are generally based on the cost of the trunk sewer and water supply network divided by the total users of that network – this results in a headworks rate ($/Equivalent Population, or $/EP, for water and sewer headworks). Since the costed network consists of some existing and some future infrastructure items, this represents a user pays charge to ‘buy into’ the spare capacity of the existing system, and those upgrades to the system required to meet the demand from new development. It is important to note that subsidies of the system etc are not included in the infrastructure costs and that ‘credits’ are given to the extent of existing ‘as-of-right’ uses on the land being developed (i.e., not requiring a planning approval).
