Social Infrastructure
Social infrastructure includes housing, healthcare and education facilities. Governments invest in social infrastructure to enable the delivery of critical public services, or to intervene where there is market failure impacting on the wellbeing of people and communities. Public sector entities make important decisions on where, what and how to invest or spend a finite pool of taxpayer funds. We are experts in bringing clarity to the choices, trade-offs, benefits and costs so that the right decision is made, and subsequently supporting implementation activities when required.
We have deep expertise in social infrastructure, particularly in housing, healthcare and education. Each area has its own unique features:
Housing
By comparison, public housing as a form of infrastructure is far simpler in nature – the levels of service are easily defined – but the problems being addressed through the mechanism of public or social housing are multi-faceted and inter-generational. This makes the policy settings for housing much more important than the investment system itself, particularly since the Crown is only one of many parties owning and delivering social housing.
Healthcare
Infrastructure for healthcare has traditionally had a heavy emphasis on the public hospital estate, funded entirely from the Crown, but until very recently owned and managed by 20 different District Health Boards. Health infrastructure is the most complex form of social infrastructure – due to a combination of the services delivered from them, the nature of the assets required and the institutional settings for ownership and operation. For most types of social infrastructure it is possible to define levels of service requirements (condition, capacity and fitness for purpose), and use these to prioritise investment need. This is much harder in health, and starts with health services planning.
Education
Education infrastructure (schools) sits somewhere in between. The institutional settings around schools, as individual Crown entities, creates complexities in the management of the Crown’s education estate. Over the past decade, great strides have been made to design and implement an investment management framework for schools such that now investments are largely streamlined. One area that remains problematic is planning for growth, with some school rolls growing rapidly while others decline.
Case Studies
Health infrastructure – Investment Strategy and Investment Management Framework.
Investment Logic Map (ILM) – development, supported by workshop facilitation.