Public Procurement Pnrr, at least 32% of construction sites delayed

At least one third of the public works in the NRP are running behind schedule. And over time the number of construction sites in difficulty is likely to become even larger. This is the key figure to be inferred from the focus dedicated by Bankitalia to contracts and the activation of construction sites of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, contained in the new Report on Regional Economies that Via Nazionale will present tomorrow.

The lenses of the Central Bank's analysts have focused in this case on the crucial strand of the NRP, the one dedicated to public works, which is called upon to offer the Recovery's most immediately perceptible structural legacy and also the most immediate trait of an effect on growth, which in fact is slow to manifest itself. The centrality of this chapter is also summarised in its numbers: according to data from Italia Domani, the government portal on the Plan, the projects financed by the resources of the common European debt and managed by public implementers are worth a total of 113 billion, i.e. just over 58% of the Plan (the rest goes to the private sector in the form of tax credits, the Repower and other interventions not yet assigned).

The figure, drawn up as of last July, may be somewhat 'dirtied' by a share of the measures defined by the remodulation of the end of 2023 and not yet completely excluded from the Italia Domani census, but the orders of magnitude are those. Approximately 80% of the measures, therefore worth 91 billion, go through a tender process, and Bankitalia is focusing on these in particular. Among the publicly managed measures, those linked to scholarships, research projects, civil service and training initiatives go without a tender.

The first step of the survey shows that as of August 2024, there were 173,000 Pnrr tenders published and surveyed by Italia Domani and the Anac database, totalling EUR 61 billion. One third of the works, 30 billion out of 91, have therefore yet to be put out to tender. The data cannot be directly compared with those of the last government report on the NRP, which at the end of July for all the measures characterised by awarding procedures indicated an activation rate of 92 per cent, because the latter analysis encompasses a broader panorama of just the public tenders examined by Bankitalia. But the question is another, and comes next.

The next stage of the Bankitalia survey aims, in fact, to take a snapshot of the state of the art of construction sites relating to tenders that have already been awarded, which account for 70% of the total and are worth a total of 32 billion euro (the average time for smaller projects is obviously less). Here, then, is the most important percentage: only 15% of construction sites have already been closed, while another 32% are in progress but are proceeding "often with large delays compared to the estimated timeframe", as the Report states. Even more dense, then, are the unknowns about the other 53% of works, which are indeed 'not started'.