Reply by President Jacob Zuma, on questions posed in the National Assembly for oral reply

Question No. 13

Ms BM Dambuza (African National Congress) to ask the President of the Republic:

(1) (a) What authority and impact does the President's Coordinating Council (PCC) have in ensuring integrated service delivery compliance and (b) how does it relate to the National Planning Commission (NPA) in terms of realising the national objective of eradicating informal settlements;
(2) whether the government has any plans to shift from the current allocation system of bulk infrastructure towards human settlements provision; if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details?

Reply:

1. (a) The President's Coordinating Council is a crucial coordinating mechanism that brings together the president, premiers, representatives of the South African Local Government Association and ministers with concurrent functions.

(b) When we established the National Planning Commission (NPC) we stated that we want it to focus on long-term issues and to harmonise and integrate long-term planning within government.

The NPC was formally established at the end of April with the appointment of Commissioners.

We gave it 18 months to produce the national plan for consideration by Cabinet and Parliament.

Although the NPC has a mandate to address long-term planning, it must also make sure that the short to medium term plans of departments do not lock government into bad decisions that will make it difficult to achieve our long term vision.

It was precisely for this reason that we tasked the Minister responsible for the National Planning Commission to lead the process of unblocking logjams in our planning system that have a profound impact especially on the development of sustainable human settlements.

2. The PCC gives effect to the provisions of chapter three of the Constitution and the Intergovernmental Relations Framework Act. In our meetings we receive reports and share ideas on the implementation of government priorities at provincial and local government level. We also identify bottlenecks in our delivery machinery and put in place processes to unblock the challenges.

The last PCC held in May focused exclusively on matters relating to human settlements. A number of obstacles were identified in the areas of planning, financing, land availability among others. We have put in place processes to respond to each of these.

The outcome of the PCC meetings is sent to Cabinet for processing so that outputs become Cabinet decisions for implementation.

In our bid to make government work better we have adopted the outcomes approach. Two outcomes are relevant to your question. Sixth outcome is about an efficient, competitive and responsive infrastructure network and eighth outcome is about sustainable human settlements and improved quality of households.

In doing background analyses of problems in both these areas, it became clear that we need better ways of coordinating infrastructure delivery. The delivery agreement for Human Settlements contains targets for the upgrading of informal settlements.

Relevant stakeholders will be brought together to play their part in ensuring a coordinated approach.

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