Viability

When IPART reviewed the fitness for the future of all NSW Councils in 2015 it found that Pittwater Council:

  • SATISFIED the financial criteria overall
  • SATISFIED the infrastructure and service management criteria
  • SATISFIED the efficiency criteria

The only criteria Pittwater did not satisfy was the minimum size requirement imposed on IPART by the NSW Baird Government’s terms of reference which took some hundreds of pages to say that if the Council was smaller than the Government’s preferred merger option it did not have suficient scale. In other words, there was no possibility of Pittwater Council satisfying the scale and capacity criteria despite passing all other objective criteria.

A copy of IPART’s assessment card on Pittwater Council appears below:

IPART-Pittwater-Assessment-October-2015Download

Pittwater Council’s Own Plan For Its Future

Pittwater Council chose not to submit a merger proposal, but to stand alone and put forward its own plan for future fitness. Here is a copy of that plan as submitted to IPART.

Pittwater-Councils-Improvement-ProposalDownload

Have mergers worked?

By comparison, the forced amalgamation of Councils has been found not to have created the savings the Baird State Government naively believed it would. In 2020 a report found that once the artificial effect of State Government grants was removed the Northern Beaches was the 5th worst performing council in NSW: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/rates-will-have-to-rise-council-mergers-in-crisis-as-losses-mount-20201027-p56926.html