New Zealand Law and Practice

There have been few PPPs in New Zealand.

There are some instances of delivery of public services by the private sector (conventional private sector procurement), but these are not widespread either.

Generally, there are no legal barriers to entering into PPPs except as follows:

• The Corrections Act 2004 prohibits the Crown from entering into any contract for the management of any prison.

• Section 130 of the Local Government Act 2002 prohibits PPPs for water and wastewater services.

• The Land Transport Management Act 2003 imposes procedural restrictions on roading PPPs.

There have been very few New Zealand PPPs of the kind described above, but one example is described in the appendix. There have been no substantial PPPs entered into by a central government agency.

New Zealand no longer has a Ministry of Works. Design and construction is almost always contracted out to the private sector. While operation and maintenance is often carried out by the public sector, this is certainly not always the case. For example, Transit New Zealand (the public agency responsible for building and maintaining state highways) contracts out all maintenance of state highways, as well as design and construction. Another example is the Auckland Central Remand prison, the operation of which was contracted out in 2000.5