PRESIDENT Aquino said on Wednesday the government is reviewing and “rethinking” the entire Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Program to speed up the process and to ensure that the country gets the necessary infrastructure projects at the cheapest possible price. Mr. Aquino made the statement at the annual presidential forum of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines at the Mandarin Oriental in Makati City, when asked about the delay being encountered in the implementation of his much-vaunted PPP program.

This developed as newly appointed PPP Center Executive Director Cosette Canilao  disclosed that 20 more national agencies, attached government agencies and local government units (LGUs) have expressed interest to avail of support from the P550 million worth Project Development Monitoring Facility (Pdmf). To date, the PPP Center has approved the request of the Department of Health (DOH) for the upgrade and modernization of the Philippine Orthopedic Center (POC) and the Department of Education (DepEd) project to construct 30,000 new classrooms to avail of support from the PDMF, she said. 

“We are reviewing the whole process and we’re trying to compress the time element involved…. We are hoping that we get the needed infrastructure at the cheapest price possible and [least] burden on the people and hence the necessity for all of the reviews,” Mr. Aquino said.
He added that the review includes a “rethinking” of an earlier possibly “wrong” assumption that the government cannot tap the budget for PPP projects, especially as the savings that it generated has created some fiscal space.

“There has been a rethinking—would it be more prudent for us to embark as originally announced with the wrong assumption? What were the wrong assumptions? That we would not have access to other funds that can give us a hybrid PPP program instead of a purely PPP program,” he said.
Mr. Aquino said the “biggest assumption” in the PPP program was that “there would be practically nothing in the budget that could be utilized for these needed infrastructure projects.”

“However, we managed quite a bit of savings. There is a significant reduction in our deficit,” he said, and cited in particular the global-peso bond float which has given the government “the fiscal space” to consider rethinking the PPP program. With such fiscal space, he said, the government can say, “Look, we can modify the partnership but it doesn’t need to be purely the pure PPP form but perhaps a two-step process wherein the government can access concessional loans that will bring down the cost of the project dramatically and therefore reduce the burden on the people.”

Mr. Aquino said even with the review in place, four PPP projects are expected to be awarded by January, as bidding for them have already commenced, among them, the Daang Hari South Luzon Expressway (Slex) project and the the DOH-PPP for vaccines.

“We have received more than 20 expressions of interest to avail support from the Pdmf and that comes from the large national agencies, the attached agencies, even the LGUs. So from that, I think you will have an idea kung gaano karami ’yun and then, of course, depende na ’yun. What we do not want from the private sector is to have deal fatigue. Pati ’yun kasama sa pag-aaralan natin and how we will proceed with the tender for 2012,” Canilao explained during a press briefing at the launch of the PDMF at the PPP Center office in Quezon City. 

Health Secretary Enrique Ona told reporters during the briefing that the project, which has a total project cost of P4.5 billion, will upgrade and modernize the facilities and obtain new equipment for the 800 hospital beds. 

This is only part of the big plan of the DOH, Ona said, which aims to offer through PPP the upgrade and modernization of 25 other specialized hospitals. The POC is a specialized government hospital that treats trauma cases and bone diseases. 

The Department of Education project, on the other hand, seeks to build around 30,000 classrooms through PPP. The project, which will be carried out in phases, will begin with the construction of around 10,000 classrooms by 2012.

The agency even sees this project being bidded out by around December this year, ahead of the 10 initially identified PPP projects for bidding this year. The Daang Hari-Slex road project which may be bidded out by the end of 2012 or early 2013.