Using non-financial public private partnerships for the maintenance of infrastructure facilities

Abstract

The maintenance of infrastructure facilities is an arduous and costly task as not only do the facilities spread over an extensive geographical area but the works could also be very diverse and fragmented. While it is the responsibility of relevant authorities to keep up with the status of the facilities, the financial burden and workload of the government in maintaining them are extremely high. Some public authorities are now bringing in novel ideas such as non-financial Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) to infrastructure maintenance. Using non-financial PPP, the service provider is reimbursed according to the level of attainment to a predetermined performance/output specification. In Hong Kong, several infrastructure maintenance projects are awarded through this type of arrangement, and it is interesting to find out the potentials and pitfalls of extending nonfinancial PPP to other similar infrastructure maintenance schemes. In this paper, the features of non-financial PPP are introduced. The implementation of non-financial PPP for infrastructure maintenance projects is examined through a survey conducted in Hong Kong. The results show that the public authorities and service providers generally believed that the mechanism for reimbursing the services provided would work and support the use of this type of arrangement for the maintenance of infrastructure facilities.