The reopening of State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura was one of several major roading projects NZTA has been working on in 2017.

Kiwi roads worth billions of dollars are cracking under the pressure of plummeting morale at the NZ Transport Agency, a leading industry figure says.

The agency charged with building New Zealand's state highways, has a revolving door of skilled staff - almost a third of the 1400 staff quitting within two years.

The loss is showing in the poor quality finish of Kiwi roads, says Ken Shirley, chief executive of the Road Transport Forum.

SUPPLIED Ken Shirley says the Road Transport Forum has been concerned for many years about "endless restructures" within NZTA.

The organisation has had growing concerns from the "endless restructures", resulting in high level of churn. Staff leaving NZTA were highly skilled technical staff and were often replaced with people who weren't, Shirley said.

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"All the reseals you see on all the main highways, resealed a few months after being completed, that comes down to supervision of the job and I don't think they're managing that well," Shirley says.

MAARTEN HOLL/STUFF The Kāpiti expressway was opened to great public fanfare last year.

"We're talking about billions of dollars worth of investments, it's quite critical."

NZTA confirmed 405 staff have left the organisation in the last two years.

An agency spokesman said a 2017 staff survey found staff had an overall satisfaction rate of 61 per cent.

Stuff understands the figure was 96 per cent in 2016, but NZTA refused to release the 2016 results - saying the methodology used in the older survey was different and not comparable.

Shirley said NZTA was "woefully deficient" in the skills the organisation needed to have to keep roads safe and useable.

The Kāpiti Expressway, just north of Wellington, opened in February, and by October, 14km of the 18km highway needed to be resealed.

The part of State Highway 1, which runs through Kaikōura and was damaged during the earthquake, was reconstructed in record time to cater to the summer tourist season.

Such mishaps had not only cost taxpayers money, but had badly affected the freight industry too, Shirley said.

"They don't seem to have any focus on freight. Before they used to have a director who managed freight and liaised with industry, there now doesn't seem to be anyone you can contact on freight issues."

An 'operator rating' system which would rate trucks for how far they complied with regulatory standards according to a complex algorithm had faced massive delays because of the depletion of technical expertise at the organisation, Shirley said.

An NZTA spokesman said a restructure in 2016, enacted on July 3, only resulted in one redundancy across the agency.

"While many roles were changed as part of the organisational transformation, our approach during the restructure was to place existing staff into new roles wherever possible."

One former NZTA staff member, who refused to be named, said this meant people with decades of experience in one department where shifted into another part of the organisation they had no experience in.

​There were two main restructures according to sources.

One restructure around two years ago involved more operational roles. A second, after current chief executive Fergus Gamie joined the organisation, focused on management roles.

Shirley said the loss of highly skilled technical staff could be seen in what he says is a growth in the number of consultants hired by the organisation.

"Because they don't have enough in-house competencies everything is done by consultants and I'm not sure we necessarily get value for money."

"At the end of the day we all pay for it."