Red tape around crucial large infrastructural projects is to be slashed as the Government bids to speed up delivery, writes Brian Mahon.

Concern has arisen over delays to major building ventures with the average timeframe for completion being stretched from five years previously to 12 years.

In the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008, a series of new spending rules were introduced in an effort to ensure the State received value for money – but ministers now believe the rules are actively adding to the cost of projects by slowing them down.

The Government is to review the National Development Plan later this year, which will help prioritise large infrastructure projects over the next decade, and there is now a drive to reduce any administrative burden, one well placed source said.

They remarked: “There is potential for major works to be implemented over the next five years.

“It has been hard to get them through the planning loops, but there needs to be a pipeline of projects for construction workers for the next ten years. They need certainty.”

The source added: “We need to be pushing on with these projects. Every year you delay them, you are adding to these costs...

“The life cycle of projects used to be around five years, but... now [it is] around 12 years.”

Currently, any project that costs more than €200m has to go through a series of what is known as ‘decision gates’, whereby Government departments have to repeatedly prove they have achieved the best value for money – and the hope is to speed up this process.

The source said that administrative delays designed to save money are now doing the opposite, adding: “If you look back at the last three years, there was massive inflation in construction.

“If you were doing a job for €100m three years ago, and you didn’t do it. But if you are doing it now, it costs you €130m.”

The latest construction tender price inflation is 3%, down from 3.9% in 2023 – after it had soared to 11.5% in 2022 as the cost of materials and unmet building demand escalated during the pandemic, according to the Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland (SCSI).

The source added: “We need to put a lot more emphasis on getting jobs on the ground.”

Asked if this meant cutting red tape, they responded: “Yes, absolutely.

“If you take the public spending code, you have to work within the rules and regulations to get value for money. But if the public spending code process is adding a year to the process, then you are adding to the cost of the project.

“A fair percentage of spend can be lost in inflation.”

The Programme for Government alluded to these hold-ups.

It said: “Delays to project delivery result in higher costs and hamper our ability to provide the necessary infrastructure to service a modern society and economy.

“It also represents a real risk to our competitiveness and to our attractiveness as a location for foreign direct investment.”

It also pledged to “review the infrastructure guidelines and create a Public Investment Act, requiring sponsoring agencies to meet timelines on development of project appraisals and other evaluations so as to reduce delays in decision-making and embed value for money across all capital projects”.

A new dedicated Infrastructure Division in a renamed Department of Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation has also been established.

The division will be led by a deputy secretary general, with a Cabinet committee on infrastructure also established for the first time.

It is understood there are now meetings taking place to see what rules can be amended or cut.

“Some of these rules were put in place to protect the public purse... but we have gone past the tipping point and the process itself is wasting money,” the source said.

“We need to take some of these gateway approvals out of the system.”

There are also plans to try to run some processes “concurrently”, rather than “waiting for one process to finish”.

“If you are finishing your environmental impact assessment, you are also preparing for planning. Smart moves like this could knock a few years off the lifecycle of a project,” the source said.

There is a belief that more autonomy needs to be given to councils to build social housing and that the current reviewing process that takes place in the Department of Housing only holds things up.

“We need to be more agile. It can’t be a Wild West job and people need to be accountable, but we need to allow people to build more things and we will get more built for less money.

“We are having a go at cracking this chestnut,” the source added.

The plans also aim to give more “certainty” to the industry, and thus entice more workers home from abroad.

The source said: “This can be a Government of delivery if we get things right. We can’t keep going the way we are going. This is costing us money... There’s a lot of people in Transport Infrastructure Ireland and local councils and they are ready to go. You need to give them the space to be ambitious.”