Procurement strategy for roading activities

About DOC’s roads

DOC is responsible for over 1,900 km of roading. This includes approximately 1,100 km of public roads, with the balance being restricted access roads.

Our roads are generally short, dispersed and unsealed. Most of our roads are not connected to one another. Instead, they are extensions from state highways and local roads. They enable public access to public conservation land, and allow our rangers and our contractors to carry out their work.

Like other road controlling authorities, the public roads we manage are eligible for NZ Transport Agency (NZTA)funding support. For every dollar we spend on approved roading activities, we can claim 51% back from NZTA.

We anticipate spending up to $23.60 million from 2024/25 to 2026/27 on the maintenance and upkeep of our roads, of which up to $22.46 million is expected to attract funding support from NZTA.

Procurement strategy

Download the strategy

Roading procurement strategy 2025-28 (PDF, 2,668K)

About the strategy

This strategy is operative until February 2028.

The characteristics of our roads (short, dispersed, and, generally, unsealed) have shaped our approach to the procurement of roading services. 

The maintenance of a disconnected series of roads is inherently more expensive than a connected network because of the downtime involved in moving resources from one road to the next, and benefits may exist in including our roads in the maintenance regimes of adjacent road controlling authorities (RCA). 

However, experience over the past six years shows that good synergies between our roading needs and the maintenance regimes of adjacent RCA does not always exist.

Key elements of the strategy

We will apply the NZTA procurement rules, and NZTA conditions attached to the 2021 strategy, to all our roading procurements, regardless of whether the activity will attract NZTA funding support. We’re doing this to align our procurements to industry standard and to keep things simple for staff. We will support this by ensuring the NZTA rules are more easily accessed by our people and by training up key staff.

Through our procurement planning, we will continue to assess the benefits of working with adjacent road controlling authorities in the delivery of roading activities, but recognise that, for a large proportion of our work, the benefits may be small and /or the adjacent RCA won’t be willing to collaborate.

We will give our staff visibility of a portfolio-wide view of roading procurements so that our procurement planning can better consider opportunities to bundle activities across DOC district and regional boundaries.

We will increase visibility of our procurement planning to potential suppliers by publishing our annual procurement schedules on our website and by making greater use of GETS to give notice of upcoming opportunities.