OAG releases its report on Long-Term Plans

The Controller and Auditor General has recently delivered to Parliament and released publicly the report, ‘ Matters arising from the 2015-25 local authority long-term plans’.

Among the matters noted were:

TLAs plan to spend $41.6 billion on capital works between 2015 and 2025 – made up of: $8.2b to meet additional demand (19%), $13.2b to improve levels of service (32%), and$20.2b to renew and replace existing assets;

The periods that TLAs used for their population projections are inconsistent. There is no legislative requirement for all TLAs to report uniformly;

In more than half of the infrastructure strategies, TLAs discussed the need to collect better information about their assets. Underground networks posed the greatest challenge in terms of asset condition information;

About a quarter of TLAs with low confidence in their asset data were not as transparent about the limitations of their data as they could have been in their infrastructure strategies;

Less than one-third of TLAs clearly linked their infrastructure and financial strategies. The report notes the Auditor-General had previously asked and expected to see strong links between a TLAs infrastructure strategy and financial strategy;

Many infrastructure strategies were not clear how the TLA would be placed in 2045 or did not foresee or plan for changes to either the financial strategy or changes to levels of service. Few strategies were clear about the most likely scenarios between 2015 & 2045 or beyond.

The report can be found at: http://www.oag.govt.nz/