Government ready to target key NDP bottlenecks

The Government is considering further changes to planning and other legislation in a bid to beat the bottleneck that has hit the National Development Plan (NDP), Mr Tom Parlon, the Minister for State at the Department of Finance, said yesterday.

Key projects continue to be dogged by delays. The Waterford by-pass, part of the Dublin-Waterford route, is over a year behind schedule. A National Toll Roads (NTR) led consortium, Celtic Roads, and Irish-French group, Vinci-Hegarty, are bidding for the €200 million project.

Speaking after a seminar in Dublin on public private partnerships (PPPs) yesterday, Mr Parlon said that if necessary, the Government would legislate to streamline regulations to speed up infrastructural development.

"We would have to look at what impediments there are [to the plan] first," he said.

"In terms of priority, if there are legislative shortcomings, then that will be looked at."

Mr Parlon argued that many of the planning law changes enacted since the NDP was launched in 1999 were working. "A number of the changes that have happened already are having an effect," he said.

However, NTR boss Mr Jim Barry, who chairs IBEC's PPP committee, warned that the delays had already thrown questions over the credibility over the whole process.

He pointed out that the €300 million Kilcock-Kinnegad project, awarded to a consortium led by SIAC last March, originally attracted 12 potential bidders when it was tendered in 2000.

Last year, Mr Barry said that only six groups began bidding to build the Clonee-Kells stretch of the N3 national route. "So you've got a situation where there are just half the number of people, there is a decline in private sector interest," Mr Barry said. "We are very much at a cross-roads with the whole process."

He explained that the cost of putting bids together for large projects runs to over €1 million.

"Companies are not going to take that kind of risk if there are not sufficient awards being made to justify it," he said.

Mr Parlon is a Minister of State at the Department of Finance, and the National Development Funding Agency (NDFA), which will have a role in PPPs, falls into his remit. The seminar he addressed yesterday was made up of interested individuals from Government, local authorities and the private sector.