NSW Treasury (Infrastructure Investor Assurance) (Treasury)
Applies the state investor assurance framework to major capital projects through staged gateway reviews, and decides funding through the annual budget process.
Responsibilities
- Set the assurance requirements for major projects by risk tier
- Commission gateway reviews at defined project stages
- Assess business cases for funding
- Allocate capital funding through the budget
Assurance gates are the clearest example in this database of a control that is obviously justified in the aggregate and whose cost is never counted.
Nobody seriously argues that a $2 billion hospital should proceed without an independent review of its business case. The question the database asks is narrower: how much of the elapsed time at each gate is review, and how much is waiting for the review to be scheduled, waiting for a committee, and waiting for the next budget?
The budget wait is the sharpest case. A project whose business case is finished
in August waits for the next budget regardless of how good it is. That is a
scheduling wait of up to a year in which nothing about the project is being
assessed, and it is invisible in every published measure of project delivery
because delivery is measured from funding approval.
Where this body appears in a process
Every point at which NSW Treasury (Infrastructure Investor Assurance) can hold something up, and why.
| Process | Step | Why it waits | Clock | Typical |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deliver a new public hospital — New South Wales | Gateway review: strategic assessment assessment | scheduling | — | 60 |
| Deliver a new public hospital — New South Wales | Gateway review: business case assessment | scheduling | — | 75 |
| Deliver a new public hospital — New South Wales | Capital funding decision in the budget decision | scheduling | — | 180 |