Continuing the 38th session, on the afternoon of October 9, the National Assembly Standing Committee (NASC) gave opinions on the draft Law on Public Investment (amended).
Presenting the report, Minister of Planning and Investment Nguyen Chi Dung said that the content of the amendment to the Law on Public Investment deeply demonstrates the spirit of breakthrough, reform, decentralization, and delegation of power according to the motto "locality decides, locality does, locality takes responsibility".
In which, the Central, National Assembly and Government play the role of creating, strengthening institutional improvement and inspection and supervision; ensuring clear people, clear work, clear responsibilities, clear results; cutting down and simplifying administrative procedures, not allowing responsibility to be passed on, avoiding creating a "request - give" mechanism.
The draft proposes to allow the separation of compensation, support, resettlement, and site clearance into independent projects for all project groups, instead of only for important national projects and group A projects as stipulated in Clause 1, Article 5 of the current Law.
The draft law decentralizes the authority to adjust medium-term and annual public investment plans of central budget capital among ministries, central and local agencies from the National Assembly Standing Committee to the Prime Minister.
At the same time, decentralize authority from the National Assembly to the Standing Committee of the National Assembly to decide on the use of the central budget's general reserve capital, increased revenue capital, central budget expenditure savings, and unallocated central budget capital in the medium-term and annual public investment plans.
The draft also proposes to increase the scale of public investment capital for important national projects from VND30,000 billion or more; for group A, group B and group C projects, the scale is twice that of current regulations.
A notable point in this amendment to the Law on Public Investment is the strong decentralization and delegation of power from the People's Council to the People's Committee.
Accordingly, the Chairman of the People's Committee at all levels decides on investment policies for group A projects with capital scale of less than 10,000 billion VND, group B and group C are managed by localities.
In addition, the Chairman of the People's Committee at all levels has the authority to adjust the medium-term and annual public investment plans for local budget capital among agencies and units and for local budget capital among tasks and projects within the agencies and units assigned capital plans under their management.
Regarding the review of the increase in the scale of public investment capital, Chairman of the National Assembly's Finance and Budget Committee Le Quang Manh proposed reviewing, counting and evaluating the number of group A projects with total investment from VND10,000 billion to VND30,000 billion and over VND30,000 billion in the recent past.
Regarding the decentralization of authority to the Chairman of the People's Committee at all levels to decide on project investment policies, this is a major change that needs to be studied and assessed thoroughly and comprehensively, placed in the context of other policies related to the issue of collective responsibility and individual responsibility.
Deciding on investment policies for projects is an important local issue, therefore, the current Law on Public Investment stipulates that the People's Council decides on investment policies for projects, and the Chairman of the People's Committee at the same level decides on investment projects, which is a measure to control power.
If the regulation stipulates that the Chairman of the People's Committee at all levels is both the person deciding on the project investment policy (Article 18) and the person deciding on the project investment (Article 40), it does not ensure objectivity.
