[PR] Minister Varadkar seeks public’s views on NRA/RPA merger

[Colm Moore]

http://www.merrionstreet.ie/index.ph...nrarpa-merger/

Minister Varadkar seeks public’s views on NRA/RPA merger

Minister to bring cost-saving measures to Cabinet

Members of the public and interested parties are being asked by Minister for Transport, Tourism & Sport Leo Varadkar to send in their views on his plan to merge the National Roads Authority (NRA) and the Railway Procurement Agency (RPA).

Interested parties and the general public can send their views about the merger into the Department via e-mail or write to the Department directly. The Minister will shortly seek Cabinet approval for his merger plans, now that the Regulatory Impact Analysis is finished.

Plans to merge the two agencies are in line with the Programme for Government, which is committed to reducing the number of State agencies. Similar proposals were put forward in the McCarthy report of 2009 (Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes), and by the OECD.

Submissions can be made by email to: margaretmalone@dttas.ie

Postal submissions should be posted or delivered to the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, 44 Kildare Street, Dublin 2, and marked for the attention of Margaret Malone, Agency Restructuring Division. To ensure your views are taken into account, please make you submission by the 24th May 2011.

Once the consultation process has been completed, a summary of the views submitted will be published on the website of the Department of Transport, Tourism & Sport, along with a list of the organisations and individuals who made submissions.

The summary table of the Regulatory Impact Analysis of the proposal will be placed on the Department of Transport website next week, accessible at the link below from Tuesday 3rd May 2011. It is drawn from the report of the Steering Group which studied the matter in full. The full Steering Group report will also be accessible by clicking on the link below.


www.dttas.ie/Publications

[dowlingm]

I'm tentatively in favour of an NRA merger with the Infrastructure bits of RPA to leverage economies of scale in procurement and engineering, but presumably it would be a good idea to leave RPA Operations separate, similar to how the EU thinks IE Operations and IE Infrastructure should be separate?

[weehamster]

I disagree with this proposed merger. A waste of time if you ask me.

I believe that the NRA should be the sole authority over every aspect that is to do with roads, national and local, taking away responsibility from local councils (if I had my way I would merge all of the local councils in one national council but that is a totally different argument for another time and place).

The NTA is be the sole authority over every aspect of public transport (planes, trains, trams, buses, taxies, hackneys, ferries etc). No CIE, RPA, IAA, no other sub agencies. Just one authority.

Both of these authorities should have real powers and should be the only ones who have a say in which projects should or shouldn't go ahead, stopping politicians using transport to paint themselves in a better light to their voters at the expense of needed projects. If we had this years ago, we'll probably have a city wide metro network called the DART instead of the single line we have now. (It sickens me to think that over 25 years after the
DART first started that we still only have one line).

Also I believe we should also have a single National Safety Authority that is in charge of all Roads, Public transport, Aviation and Marine safety, again replacing the likes of the RSA, RSC etc.

[Mark Gleeson]

Under EU law you have to separate infrastructure from operations so you can't have an all over agency, so you end up with infrastructure design/construct/maintenance agency and an operations agency which contracts out the services. We would very much like this

You should be able to have a single transport safety investigation agency and that is happening and to be located in Drogheda.

[Colm Moore]

Originally Posted by weehamster

I believe that the NRA should be the sole authority over every aspect that is to do with roads, national and local, taking away responsibility from local councils (if I had my way I would merge all of the local councils in one national council but that is a totally different argument for another time and place).

I hear what you are saying, but you risk a HSE situation where the organisation is too big (100,000+ employees) and tends to report only to itself. While hospitals are nominally independent, they aren't really.

What one needs is a high level supervisory authority and appropriately sized organisations that do service delivery.