A radio transmission site in Canterbury. Photo: Supplied / Tait Systems
Cost pressures and delays face the billion-dollar-plus overhaul of emergency communications technology systems that had let down first responders in previous disasters.
The Public Safety Network project was recently rated top of the ''Top 10 reported cost pressures by value" in a freshly released (but dated) Treasury report.
Its main contractor missed a contractual milestone triggering a briefing last August by police, which runs the project.
It was one of four high-risk investments that made the agenda at the first few meetings of the new Infrastructure and Investment Ministers Group last year, an OIA response said.
Meantime, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) is working to get its own five-year emergency response systems overhaul underway this year, three years on from Cyclone Gabrielle, though it still depended it said on securing Budget funding.
The cellphone part of the three-part Public Safety Network has been delivered already but not the bigger digital radio part - which requires work on 500 hilltops and other spots - and most of the $1.8 billion budget remains unspent.
The delay has pushed the radio rollout in the final regions from this year to next.
That was not among the Top 10 delays that Treasury told ministers about in its Quarterly Investment Report to June 2025, the latest that has been made public.
The government agency in charge, Next Generation Critical Communications or NGCC, has said it could not scrimp on testing to ensure it all worked every time.
"The safety of [30,000] emergency responders and the public they serve depends on it."
'Hugely challenged'
The network would combine new technology across cellphones, digital radio and alert devices to protect and prioritise them for police, fire and ambulance first responders.
It had been designed to overcome the sorts of blackouts that plagued them when Cyclone Gabrielle took out power to hundreds of cellphone towers.
First endorsed by Cabinet in 2020, the project had spent just a sixth ($308 million) of its budget by last June, the date of Treasury's latest available quarterly investment report (QIR).
The $100m appropriated for the project in Budget 2025 was easily the highest among those initiatives that got higher funding than planned.
Tait Systems took over full charge of it in 2024 when Kordia reduced itself to subcontractor status.
"In addition to delays caused by the vendor change, the project is one of the largest P25 [a type of standard] land mobile radio networks in the world under construction and is hugely challenged by the remoteness of many of the 500 sites required and New Zealand's geography and weather," NGCC told RNZ this week.
"Timing delays in the NGCC" have featured in police reports about financial impacts, such as how they spent $70m less on property and plant last year than expected.
Tait Systems took over full charge of the project in 2024, when Kordia reduced itself to subcontractor status. Photo: Supplied / Tait Systems
Tait had still to acquire over 200 of the 500 sites needed for the radio network. Almost 100 were ready for testing and 61 were being built, with Auckland, Wellington and Canterbury best covered so far, covering 60 percent of the population.
"All except two Auckland sites are now in the build stage."
Over 20,000 radio terminals were being put into vehicles, stations and buildings. This was "well underway", said NGCC.
On the cellphone front, there were now 27,000 connections linked to the stronger network.
The project was not upgrading the fraught 111 emergency call system; police were looking afresh at that separately.
Treasury refused to release the police briefing about the contractual milestone miss on commercial grounds.
In 2024 MPs were told that "vendor issues" that might hold the project up had been resolved.
Treasury also blanked out exactly how much cost pressure the Public Safety Network project was under, though its report gave a total of $70m in cost pressure across the Top 10.
The quarterly reports detailed Cabinet efforts to get a better steer on big projects from agencies whose business plans have often been found wanting. They charted where the biggest and highest risk projects were at, but for public purposes gave only a dated view as they were typically released when they were already six months old.
Big jobs ahead
Cyclone Gabrielle marked the start of three years that have featured more storm inquiries with findings that the country's emergency comms were still not good enough, a scrapping of Labour's efforts to overhaul emergency management laws in favour of new efforts, and a struggle to deliver big, complicated technologies.
The National Emergency Management Agency had entered the fray with a five-year programme.
It could begin on that this year said NEMA, though that depended on more policy work, legislation and "availability of new funding through future Budgets".
It was working on "the evidence base and business cases" to get it going, NEMA told RNZ this week.
The operational systems side of this was rated a "high-risk" investment in the quarterly report. It had been due for a Treasury 'Gateway' review late last year to check the quality of its project planning.
Among what it might deliver was a National Warning System and a Common Operating Picture or COP to let police, fire and ambulance all see the same picture of what was happening in real time.
COPs have been talked about as essential but missing by storm investigators for many years.
Tait Systems declined to comment.
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