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Performance

Value for Money, Efficiency and Effectiveness

Why are we reporting on Value for Money, Efficiency, & Effectiveness?

The Government Policy Statement on land transport 2024-34 signalled that road maintenance and renewals should see an increase in Value for Money (VfM). The first step in improving any performance area is to be able to monitor and report on current performance.

This new comparison is not about the relativity of outcomes and who is the best or worst performing council. This reporting is about self-improvement, so knowing how your RCA compares to others is important information. It also helps identify opportunities for peer exchange of best practices to aid self-improvement.

What are the three measures?

The three measures represent different lenses or dimensions of the question, ‘How good is my maintenance delivery compared to others?’

  • Value for Money (condition/cost) - how well is my network performing in terms of the costs of maintenance work?

  • Efficiency (quantity/cost) - how much does maintenance work cost on my network?

  • Effectiveness (condition/quantity) - how good is the road condition for the work we are doing?

Networks will incur higher or lower costs for the amount of work they do because of a range of factors, only some of which can be influenced by the RCA. At the same time, the impact of the work varies between councils. By using all three parameters, councils can understand their performance better.

The Value for Money, Efficiency and Effectiveness tile on the Performance Dashboard shows how the council compares with it’s peers for the three measures.

Click the (i) icon at the top right of the tile to see the More Information popup for the tile.

Why do we compare RCAs to their peers?

Each network's condition outcomes and work requirements will be unique for known cost drivers such as urban/rural split, traffic volumes, and other environmental factors. Peer group comparisons are more meaningful than comparing networks with little in common, e.g. comparing a small rural district with large metros.

The peer groups for these measures are different from earlier peer groups in Transport Insights because we have introduced combined reporting of conditions and costs. Changes to the existing peer groups were needed to reflect the influences of traffic volumes as well as urban/rural split.

  • The largest city councils in NZ are currently split across three peer groups. The two largest (Auckland and Christchurch) plus Dunedin have been merged with the others to create a group of the top 7 City Councils in NZ by VKT.

  • The Provincial Centres peer group has 40+% of the City Councils and District Councils in NZ and these have a wide range of VKT. RCAs with a lower VKT (< 300M) have been moved into their own Lower VKT Provincial Centres group. Kawerau DC has also been assigned to this group.

  • Selwyn District Council has increased its urban percentage over recent years sufficiently to trigger a change into a different peer group. Selwyn has moved into the Higher VKT Provincial Centres group.

What information is being used to calculate the results?

As indicated above, the three performance indicators are calculated from the following information: Condition, Cost, and Quantity.

The condition of the road network (Condition)

The calculation uses the latest 75th percentile roughness level across all the sealed roads in the network as the Condition indicator. The Road Condition detail page in the Performance Dashboard shows the 75th percentile roughness trend.

What is spent maintaining the road network (Cost)

The calculation totals the council share and NZTA share of NLTP funded road maintenance costs for road resurfacing, pavement rehabilitation, and drainage maintenance work done. These are the maintenance activities that have the most direct impact on the condition of sealed roads. The calculation includes the costs to date for the three years of the current NLTP period. The Road Maintenance Delivery and Transport Programme Delivery detail pages in the Performance Dashboard show the trend of road maintenance costs for the council.

How much work have we done (Quantity)

The calculation totals the amount in kilometres of road maintenance carried out for road resurfacing, pavement rehabilitation, and kerb and channel drainage. The calculation includes the work done to date for the three years of the current NLTP period. The Road Maintenance Delivery detail page in the Performance Dashboard shows the trends of road maintenance work done by the council.

How are the results compared to the peer councils?

For each of the Value for Money, Efficiency, and Effectiveness measures, the RCAs are ordered within each peer group by their normalised result and the highest, middle and lowest 1/3's are identified within the peer group. Each level shows as a different shade of blue as indicated in the More Information popup for the tile.

Future reporting

As consistent condition data becomes available for the whole country, reporting on efficiency and value for money will be expanded to use the additional data. Benchmark reporting will also be extended in Transport Insights over time to include a wider range of cost and quality influencers such as access to quality raw materials, weather in the area, geology and terrain, etc.