A primary school could be the next public institution built under a public private partnership (PPP), Infrastructure Minister Bill English says.He was commenting the day after the Government announced a new prison in Wiri, South Auckland was planned to be
A primary school could be the next public institution built under a public private partnership (PPP), Infrastructure Minister Bill English says.
He was commenting the day after the Government announced a new prison in Wiri, South Auckland was planned to be built through PPP.
Cabinet papers obtained by Radio New Zealand showed the Government would decide this month whether to approve the private sector building and maintaining a primary school by 2013.
The new school would be built on crown land but would be owned by the private company who would rent it back to the Board of Trustees.
Mr English told Radio New Zealand such an arrangement would give the Government an opportunity to be less concerned with details of how the school was built and to focus on what kind of building and education was wanted.
"We'll go through the same process with that as with the prisons where you have a pretty thorough look at it, you compare it to efficient public sector procurement of it and that gives you a benchmark ... any kind of PPP would have to do better than (that benchmark).
"Then eventually you go to the market to see if you can actually get something that's better."
There were around 3000 schools in New Zealand and it would be a "worthwhile experiment" to allow one where the people who built the school were responsible for its operation, Mr English said.
"If anything went wrong with one of these projects financially it's the private sector that take the hit not the government and I'd have to say, as Minister of Finance, it gets a bit wearying when the taxpayer has to take the hit when things go wrong because we have to go and find money we didn't expect to have to find."
Mr English said PPPs would always be a "small proportion" of the Government's new capital investment "let alone", its total capital investment.
"It's something that we feel we can learn a lot from some of the things the private sector does so we can apply those techniques across all the assets that the taxpayer owns."
Mr English and Corrections Minister Judith Collins said yesterday the 1000-bed male prison at Wiri could be built more cheaply than a conventional prison and save between 10 and 20 percent in running costs over the 25 to 35-year life of the project.
They hoped the prison would be open by 2014.
Labour's law and order spokesman Clayton Cosgrove said locking people up in jails was a job for the state, not for private businesses whose prime motivation would be to make money.
"Labour doesn't care who builds or designs a prison, but the state should run them. Punishment and rehabilitation are a core function of government. By transferring such a core function, even with so-called safeguards, to the private sector, the Government is shirking its responsibility for the safety of staff and the community if things go wrong.
"There is no evidence to suggest privately operated prisons are better, safer or cheaper to run," he said.
The previous National government allowed an Australian-based company to run Auckland remand prison, but the contract was cancelled after Labour came to power.
Green Party corrections spokesman David Clendon said private prisons were internationally notorious for corruption and the abuse of prisoners and staff.
"When you create perverse incentives for corporations to make money out of criminals it leads to corruption such as the United States case last year, where judges in Pennsylvania have been charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes to send teenagers to privately run youth detention centres," he said.
