The Report of the Assonime Board identifies 10 areas of intervention for the revitalization of infrastructures in Italy and proposes some priority lines of action for each of them. The proposed measures aim to strengthen the public and private financing channels of the infrastructures and to improve the legal-institutional framework, with particular attention to the needs of the public-private partnership.
1. Use public funds more efficiently: allocate a large portion of the European structural funds reserved for Italy to financing infrastructure; rationalize the planning of infrastructures of national and local interest; increase the ability of administrations to define priorities in the use of public resources through rigorous assessments of new investments.
2. Speed up the decision-making process and make the flow of contributions more certain: ensure a greater frequency of meetings of the CIPE, reduce the time for extension of the deliberations after the adoption of the decision, ensure the timeliness of the control by the Court of Auditors; strengthen the restriction on the destination of public contributions for infrastructure projects, for example by channeling all the resources disbursed for this purpose by the European Union, the State, the Regions into special funds and specific allocations flowing into current accounts opened for payments by the contracting authority; guarantee the timely implementation of the electronic invoicing obligation for public administrations in order to strengthen the tools aimed at ensuring compliance with payment times.
3. Maximize the effects of public resources through guarantees: at European level, strengthen the Project Bond Initiative, moving from the experimental phase to a fully operational phase and broadening its scope of application; provide for a faster channel of access to the program for projects that have obtained certification from accredited bodies; introduce at national level guarantee instruments similar to those of the Project Bond Initiative to support the placement of project bonds relating to selected infrastructure projects.
4. Strengthen the role of tax breaks in supporting infrastructure investments: fully implement the tax exemption regime introduced by law n.183/2011; extend the application of the tax credit and the exemption from the payment of concession fees provided for by decree law no. 179/2012 to works whose final planning is approved after 31 December 2016, to works already awarded in the presence of particular circumstances and to projects with a value lower than the current threshold of 200 million.
5. Support venture capital participation: promote the development of funds that invest in equity and hybrid instruments; increase the involvement of investors who do not invest directly in the sector but who can do so by investing in a fund; create a favorable context for the development of long-term investment funds (ELTIF).
6. Mitigate the risk of PPP funded projects: in the sectors most exposed to uncertainty about revenues from tariffs, encourage the administrations to structure the concessions by providing, also following the example of other European countries, availability fees; actively affirming in the European offices the need not to tighten the criteria for accounting for concessions in the public budget.
7. Strengthen the professionalism of the contracting authorities and the quality of the projects: reduce the number of contracting stations and envisage the use of central purchasing bodies also for public works, allowing the management of the relationship to be entrusted to the central purchasing body as well; make mandatory the prior definition of adequate feasibility studies (financial, economic and social) and forms of prior consultation with the operators (companies and lenders) to ensure the bankability of the work; promote the standardization of tender documents and conventions.
8. Make available a PPP task force unit: make available to the public administrations a structure which, making use of the existing skills in the system, can, upon request, verify the bankability of the project, provide technical assistance for the financial profiles and help in communicating investment opportunities to the market. Involve the task force in the definition of guidelines and standard contracts and in the formation of expertise in the contracting stations.
9. Reform Title V of the Constitution: complete the recent constitutional reform proposal which brings back to the legislative competence of the State a series of crucial matters for the development of infrastructures and introduces a "supremacy clause" of the state law for the implementation of programs of national interest; provide for state competence for the introduction of standard administrative procedures.
10. Promote investment-friendly regulation: ensure the stability of the rules and reduce the risk of reformatio in pejus; streamline the authorization procedures and make them certain in terms of time; reduce administrative disputes regarding public contracts; increase the disincentives to daredevil arguments; limit the duration of suspensions to 30 days; provide for recourse in a single instance to the Council of State for works of major public interest.
