The pressure on the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF) to meet an expanding range of activities and demand is a challenge requiring urgent and concerted attention.
As a result of the financial impact of COVID-19 and other economic factors, many activities have been deferred to future years. We do not expect the current system to sustainably meet the requirements for funding the maintenance, operation and development of the land transport system.
The state highway network is one of the country’s most important assets, playing an important role in delivering public transport solutions and connecting people and goods across the country. We’ve set a baseline for our system outcome measure that monitors the condition of the state highway network. This helps us understand whether the condition of state highways supports the safety and resilience of the land transport system and to see if it is improving.
A legislative amendment in April 2022 requires new kura/school signs to be bilingual. We partnered with Te Mātāwai, the Crown partner for Māori language revitalisation, on He Tohu Huarahi Māori Bilingual traffic signs programme, with the first bilingual traffic signs unveiled in May 2022. With more than 2,500 schools in Aotearoa, this represents a significant opportunity to increase New Zealanders’ exposure to te reo Māori.
Te Ara Kotahi, our Māori strategy, provides a guiding framework for us to work with and respond to Māori. We continue to lead, drive and uphold our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and partnering with Māori through Te Ara Kotahi initiatives. We’ve established the Improving Māori Road Safety project and refreshed Te Ara Poutama, our staff cultural capability framework, to better align with public sector. Te Ara Kotahi is now over three years old and a refreshed strategy will be delivered in 2023.
We refreshed Tū Ake Tū Māia, our regulatory strategy, consulting with internal and external groups who perform regulatory functions about what’s important as we take a longer-term view of the land transport system and our future regulatory role within it. We also developed a new framework to objectively measure our regulatory performance.
We are establishing a regulatory operating model to support the new Director of Land Transport requirements. The regulatory operating model ensures we have the appropriate structure, support and expertise to deliver effective outcomes.
We continued our review of fees and charges to ensure a sustainable funding model supports the delivery of regulatory activities, capability and performance. We completed public consultation on the review, which industry and the public broadly supported, and started designing the changes needed to make final recommendations to Cabinet for a revised regulatory funding and fees regime.
We have more staff investigating and recovering unpaid road user charges, enhanced our digital road user charges collection methods, strengthened our process when taking legal action against non-compliant operators and increased our legal enforcement. Through these changes, we’ve increased road user charges debt recovery by $18 million compared with last year.
Our national public transport ticketing project is implementing a nationally coordinated approach to regional payment solutions for public transport services. This will, among other things, give customers a better payment experience across public transport networks. The project is in the final stages of the procurement process to select a preferred supplier. This process has been impacted by the complex nature and the scale of the contract, number of stakeholders plus COVID-related challenges.
We launched the innovation fund Hoe ki Angitū to support and accelerate innovative transport solutions that will help tackle some of the transport challenges we’re facing. These challenges include reducing emissions, improving road safety, encouraging mode shift and developing more sustainable materials for use in land transport construction, maintenance and operations. Over the next two years, $15 million has been allocated to support private sector innovators at various stages of the innovation cycle.
Accelerating digital is one of our strategic priorities. There was good momentum in the development of the Digital Strategy, which will set out the direction we will take to create new opportunities with data and information.
We also made good progress in understanding and addressing our critical digital risks.
We reviewed and reset our strategic risks following the COVID-19 pandemic and to reflect the expanded range of responsibilities and services expected of us. Strategic risks are reviewed quarterly and cover health, safety and wellbeing, workload prioritisation and climate change response.
While we continue to have critical risks across the areas of technology, cybersecurity and information security, we have taken steps to increase our capacity and readiness to respond to potential cyber-attacks and to address our critical digital risks.
