By 2025, government should reform public spending frameworks for infrastructure to provide longer term certainty and more effective management by:
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- setting fixed budgets for capital infrastructure for at least five years
- moving away from annual controls for major capital projects and instead giving major projects a fixed budget with the ability to move money forward and backward across years within that budget
- accounting for maintenance and renewal spend separately from capital or resource spend — these budgets should be set for at least five years, with departments identifying an indicative longer term pipeline that highlights any particularly large upcoming maintenance or renewal spend
- giving infrastructure ‘megaprojects’ their own ‘project expenditure limit’ including explicit contingency budgets, separate to the department which runs them
- adopting the funding profile set out by the Commission’s recommendations in future spending reviews.
