The House public works committee’s technical working group finalized a substitute bill for the proposed Public Private Partnership Rationalization Act designed to support President Rodrigo Duterte’s ‘Build, Build, Build’ program.
Albay Rep. Joey Sarte Salceda, who chairs the technical panel and authored one of the original PPPRA bills, said the measure sought to “institutionalize and strengthen public-private partnership in infrastructure and development projects, the value of PPPs in delivering the country’s infrastructure requirements and utilizing the efficiencies of private sector participation is crucial to the success of the ‘Build, Build, Build’ program.”
“We need enormous investments, resources and innovation from the private sector. We will translate these PPP opportunities into more jobs, improved competitiveness and higher economic growth. . . Now is indeed the time to forge more public-private partnerships to deliver critical projects that will usher the country’s Golden Age of Infrastructure,” he said.
Salceda said the bill proposed major reforms to help boost the PPP program, among them, providing clearer and simpler rules for faster project implementation to foster competition, which is what the government needs as it rolls out big ticket projects.
It sets clearer parameters on government undertakings and investment recovery schemes, procedures on project approval and procurement, fiscal rules on contingent liabilities and other vital concerns, he said.
The substitute bill consolidated the salient features from separate proposals filed by Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and Reps. Sonny Belmonte, Miro Quimbo, Romeo Acop, Vilma Santos-Recto, Gary Alejano, Manuel Lopez, Luis Raymond Villafuerte and Salceda himself, who explained the new bill is a “product of the government’s learning experience in doing PPPs for the past decades” and “• will accelerate the implementation of the Philippine Development Plan 2017-2022, under which giant transport and industrial projects are listed.
He said the measure aimed to promote public infrastructure financing by including joint ventures as PPP variants, opening capital markets for the financing of PPP projects in addition to equity and loans and defining the roles and participation of LGUs in PPPs.
It will also encourage foreign investments in public infrastructure in view of the upcoming approval of the proposed amendments to the Public Service Act, a bill that Salceda also authored.