My Account
Mahurangi ratepayers are unlikely to ever know if the pain of joining the Auckland supercity was worth it.
The government has confirmed that a promised post-implementation review of Auckland’s amalgamation, to understand the impacts and outcomes of the reforms over the short, medium and longer-term, will never be done.
The Department of Internal Affairs told Mahurangi Matters that it undertook some preliminary work on the establishment phase of this work.
“However, the second Canterbury earthquake in February 2011, and the subsequent need to support the government and the impacted councils, meant that resources were redirected from the Auckland evaluation work,” a spokesperson said.
“No report on the evaluation was completed.
“With the scale of other work in the local government sector currently underway, there are no plans at this stage to undertake a specific review into Auckland governance.”
Northern Action Group (NAG) chair Bill Foster says he is not surprised that the government has no appetite for a review that might not produce the results it wants.
He was also disappointed the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance recommendation that an independent auditor be appointed to see if Auckland was fit for purpose, as highlighted by Cr Greg Sayers earlier this year, had never been taken up.
“The current discussion around co-governance and democracy can be likened to what Rodney faced with the amalgamation. It got railroaded by the government.”
The news that there will be no scrutiny of what amalgamation has delivered comes on the back of a report released last month by the Infrastructure Commission that found there is little evidence of cost efficiencies from larger local governments.
Titled ‘Does size matter? The impact of local government structure on cost efficiency’, the report examined whether local government size (as measured by population) and structure affects the cost of providing three types of local government services – road maintenance, building consents and council overhead costs.
“After controlling for other factors that affect costs, we find no evidence of cost economies of scale,” the report stated.
“Councils with higher population density, or lower per-person vehicle kilometres travelled, tend to have lower road maintenance costs.
“In the case of building consent costs, where all councils are legally required to provide a similar service and are prohibited from charging more than the cost of providing the service, we could not identify any variables that explain differences in costs. However, consenting costs did vary significantly across councils.
“In the case of council overhead costs, we examined the impact of council population size on per-capita governance, support and other costs over the 2003-2021 period. This reflects ‘overhead’ costs to service elected members, prepare annual and long-term plans, and provide back-office services like IT and human resources. We find that council size neither increases nor decreases overhead costs.”
Bill Foster says while the report does support the argument that there are no advantages to amalgamation, it was limited in scope to roads, building consents and council overheads.
“It took no account of the quality of service being delivered and whether people are really getting what they want,” he said.
Foster says NAG has exhausted all avenues to try to get Rodney out of the supercity and is now focused on lobbying for a better structure within the system.
“The current silo structure, where none of the departments talk to one another, isn’t working. Rodney needs someone like a local area manager who can work across all these silos to get issues fixed efficiently.
“We’ll keep arguing for a more local and coordinated approach to local issues.”
Reducing overhead costs was a key desired outcome of Auckland’s 2010 amalgamation. The Royal Commission projected that amalgamation would result in estimated efficiency gains of between $76 million to $113 million per year, equivalent to 2.5% to 3.5% of the legacy Auckland councils’ total expenditure for 2008/09. These efficiency gains were expected to come primarily from reduced council overhead costs.
