NRA to order review of road costings

The National Roads Authority will appoint consultants to review its "investment appraisal and monitoring systems", or value for money, on its multi-billion euro roads programme.

The consultants will be asked to study the management and monitoring of the authority's €1.3 billion per year "investment programmes and projects" - both in the recent past and those in the pipeline.

The authority is expected to spend another €8-€10 billion completing its motorway and national road improvement programme by about 2010.

Details of the proposal for a consultancy study were published on the Government e-tendering website last Friday.

Tenders must be submitted by the end of September.

The appointment of outside consultants follows impatience among senior management that it has been blamed for the dramatic increase in the cost of the State's roads programme.

It also follows lengthy questioning of senior management by members of the Oireachtas Committee of Public Accounts.

At committee hearings, the roads authority chief executive Mr Michael Tobin delivered a trenchant defence of spending on the roads programme, after Dáil deputies told him there was widespread unease at the spiralling cost of the roads programme.

Mr Tobin told the committee that while much attention had focused on the figure of €5.6 billion contained in the National Development Plan published in 1999, and the 2003 estimated cost of €16.4 billion, the two programmes were vastly different.

Mr Tobin said the authority had been blamed for inflation in the cost of the roads programme when in fact what the agency had been asked to do had changed dramatically.

The figure of €5.6 billion was what was allocated in the National Development Plan, said Mr Tobin, "and not the estimated cost of completing the schemes involved".

Mr Tobin said the authority had no input into determining the initial allocation and it really was not fair that the authority was blamed when the programme changed to include the cost of the Dublin to Waterford motorway, which was added later.

Mr Tobin quoted from a Fitzpatrick Economists report which assessed the cost of the programme in January 2002 at €15.8 billion and which concluded "... factors which are in the direct control of the NRA would appear to be well managed, and most difficulties have arisen from external factors and difficulties in managing these". The shortfall in allocation was also identified in a report carried out by the comptroller and auditor general.

The auditor noted factors in the increasing cost of the roads programme included inflation in the construction industry of 40 per cent between 1999 and 2003, a higher standard of road design and the inclusion of 13 additional road schemes.