INTRODUCTION

On 1 January 2018, a new Polish Water Law Act entered into force. The voluminous bill, comprising more than 550 articles, introduced significant changes to the Polish water resources management system. It was adopted to ensure the full implementation of the Water Framework Directive ( ‘WFD’ ) into the national legal system.

The crucial idea behind the Water Law Act was to achieve a major improvement of water resources management. The bill was meant to resolve the most severe problems Poland now faces in, inter alia, ensuring good water quality, determination of effective drought and flood prevention measures and deciding how best to use particular water resources.The expectation of the legislator was also that the new rules would constitute an important factor encouraging businesses to apply more sustainable operation models.

Therefore, the new Water Law Act envisaged many new legal instruments aimed at achieving these purposes. One of the most controversial and debatable of the solutions introduced by this Act concerns fees for water services. For this reason, this contribution analyses these regulations, with a particular focus on fees for water abstraction and waste-water discharge, as these water services are most widely provided.Thus, this chapter will answer the following questions:

• 1) Do the new rules on fees for water abstraction and waste-water discharge adopted by the Polish legislator constitute a proper implementation of the WFD, in particular do they respond adequately to the principle of recovery of costs of water services ?

• 2) Does the Polish water services’ fee system encourage businesses to adopt more sustainable operation solutions, enabling them to save water or generate less waste-water ?

FORMER RULES REGULATING WATER FEES IN POLAND

Assessing whether the new Polish rules on water fees constitute proper implementation of the WFD should be preceded by a brief description of former rules relating to incurring fees for certain forms of water use, in order to emphasise the scope and significance of changes introduced by the new Water Law Act.