Have engineers caused the ballooning of big projects?

Blaming the profession lets the real cost driver — a broken delivery model — off the hook.

  Politicians are suddenly telling engineers to rein in their ambitions. Stuff reported this week that officials want the profession to drop its ‘gold-plated’ instincts and design something the country can actually afford.

It is a convenient story. It is also the wrong diagnosis.

  Engineers did not invent the rule that every Road of National Significance must be four lanes and grade-separated, regardless of what the business case says. Politicians did.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has called those roads exactly what they are, pointing to verges and central reservations cut wider through hillsides at a cost of millions on the Puhoi to Warkworth motorway alone.

The engineers are following a brief. The brief is political — as anyone following the Fix Hill Street campaign at Warkworth already knows: a four-lane motorway got built while the intersection it was meant to relieve stayed broken.

  New Zealand used to have a different answer.

The Ministry of Works, the old Public Works Department running since 1870, designed, consented and built most of the country's major roads under one roof, with its own government architect, engineers, quantity surveyors, procurement staff and construction crews, on a not-for-profit basis, much like the United States Army Corps of Engineers still does.

Parliament abolished it in 1988. I set out how that decision hollowed out the state's institutional knowledge previously.

Every project since has been assembled through a chain of separate consultants, each billing separately, each carrying its own margin, each overlapping and double checking, with nobody left holding the whole job.

  Public Private Partnerships do not fix that structure — they multiply it.

Government hires consultants to design and cost a project, buys the land, secures consent, then negotiates a PPP contract so it can lend a private company the money to build it and effectively hire-purchases the asset back over decades.

Transmission Gully shows where that leads. Budgeted at $850 million in 2016, its net present cost has climbed to $1.25 billion, with annual payments now running at $180 million or more — a bill taxpayers will keep paying long after the road opened.

  The private sector is not shy about billing for that structure elsewhere either.

A Central Hawke's Bay community cut off by a flood-damaged bridge since Cyclone Gabrielle has spent years being told by council that repair is not feasible, forcing a five-kilometre detour and rerouted school buses while officials negotiate funding shares with the Transport Agency. Communities in that position often find independently sourced pricing lands well under what officials were quoted — a pattern worth scrutinising every time a ‘not viable’ verdict is handed down.

  Staging makes it worse.

Multi-year projects built in stages carry a political risk premium. Contractors price in the chance that the next government cancels, redesigns or defers the following stage, and every year of delay adds cost the public eventually wears.

Ministers now talk of toll concessions, handing operating rights on a road to a private concessionaire in exchange for an upfront payment, modelled on Sydney's WestConnex. It is one more layer of margin dressed up as innovation.

  Tolling was supposed to be the efficient alternative.

The Northern Gateway Toll Road has collected more than $101 million in nine years, on track to have recovered 42.5 percent of its build cost inside a decade. Yet a meaningful share of every toll dollar goes on debt servicing and operating costs rather than new capacity, and neither the Northern Gateway nor the Tauranga Eastern Link is forecast to be debt-free before the late 2030s.

  None of this needs a verdict on any engineer's competence. It needs one on the model.

Too many margins are stacked between the taxpayer and the asset, and no single organisation is accountable for delivering the whole thing. Cut out the middle men, put design, procurement and delivery back under one publicly accountable roof, and ‘gold-plated’ stops being an accusation anyone needs to make.

The engineers were never the problem. The system that pays them to be is.