CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 5 6^th Decem­ber 2019

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

FOR DIS­CUS­SION

Title: STRA­TEGIC RISK MAN­AGE­MENT AND MON­IT­OR­ING COR­POR­ATE PERFORMANCE

Pre­pared by: DAV­ID CAMER­ON, DIR­ECT­OR OF COR­POR­ATE SERVICES

Pur­pose

This paper presents an update on the Authority’s per­form­ance to date in work­ing towards deliv­ery of stra­tegic object­ives estab­lished in the 2018 to 2022 Cor­por­ate Plan.

The paper focuses on deliv­ery against the Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors adop­ted as meas­ures of per­form­ance in deliv­ery of our Cor­por­ate Plan, while high­light­ing by excep­tion any sig­ni­fic­ant con­straints, risks or short­com­ings on planned delivery.

The paper also presents the latest ver­sion of the Stra­tegic Risk Register, fol­low­ing ongo­ing review and mit­ig­a­tion action by the Man­age­ment Team and review by the Audit and Risk Committee.

Inform­a­tion is presen­ted on deliv­ery against the Cor­por­ate Plan only in this paper. Updates on deliv­ery of the Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan for 2017 to 2022 are presen­ted sep­ar­ately at dif­fer­ent points of the year.

Recom­mend­a­tions

The Board is asked to:

a) Review the update on cor­por­ate per­form­ance and stra­tegic risk man­age­ment set out in this paper. b) High­light any achieve­ments or excep­tions which, from a stra­tegic lead­er­ship per­spect­ive, Board mem­bers believe are of par­tic­u­lar sig­ni­fic­ance to the deliv­ery of the Authority’s stra­tegic object­ives. c) Review and com­ment on the risk register for com­plete­ness in cov­er­age of cur­rent stra­tegic risks and adequacy of mit­ig­a­tion actions.

Stra­tegic Context

1. The Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan, http://​cairngorms​.co​.uk/​w​p​-​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​u​p​l​o​a​d​s​/​2​0​1​8​/​0​7​/​C​N​P​A​C​o​r​p​o​r​a​t​e​P​l​a​n​2​0​1​8​-​2​0​2​2.pdf describes how we will con­trib­ute to the deliv­ery of the Cairngorms Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan (NPPP).

2. The Cor­por­ate Plan also sets out how the CNPA will sup­port the Government’s cent­ral pur­pose: to focus the Gov­ern­ment and pub­lic ser­vices on cre­at­ing a more suc­cess­ful coun­try, with oppor­tun­it­ies for all of Scot­land to flour­ish, through increased well­being and sus­tain­able and inclus­ive eco­nom­ic growth and deliv­ery of the Pro­gramme for Gov­ern­ment. To this end, the plan high­lights (page 13) that the work of the Author­ity makes a con­tri­bu­tion to 6 of the Scot­tish Government’s Nation­al Out­comes agreed with­in the Nation­al Per­form­ance Framework.

3. A cor­por­ate per­form­ance frame­work is required to meas­ure the extent to which we suc­ceed in deliv­er­ing the pri­or­it­ies agreed in the cor­por­ate plan and make the desired con­tri­bu­tions to wider nation­al gov­ern­ment strategies. The Board agreed the Authority’s cor­por­ate per­form­ance frame­work as an integ­ral part of the Cor­por­ate Plan. The inform­a­tion presen­ted with this paper fol­lows those agreed Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors (KPIs).

Stra­tegic Policy Considerations

1. The Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan makes ref­er­ence to our con­tri­bu­tion to Nation­al Out­comes. In most cases the cor­por­ate per­form­ance indic­at­ors do not present a dir­ect meas­ure of con­tri­bu­tion to the spe­cif­ic out­comes. Rather, they are agreed to rep­res­ent an appro­pri­ate ​“proxy” indic­at­or, whereby our demon­stra­tion of achieve­ment in a spe­cif­ic area of the Authority’s oper­a­tions is accep­ted as a reas­on­able meas­ure of our con­tri­bu­tion to wider nation­al or port­fo­lio objectives.

Stra­tegic Risk Management

1. The Board con­sidered and approved the new stra­tegic risk register sup­port­ing deliv­ery of the 2018 to 2022 Cor­por­ate Plan at its meet­ing in June 2018. The Board also endorsed the Authority’s Stra­tegic Risk Man­age­ment Strategy at the same meeting.

2. The stra­tegic risk register is reg­u­larly reviewed and updated by both the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee and the Man­age­ment Team with the Board con­sid­er­ing the pos­i­tion on stra­tegic risk man­age­ment at the same time as it con­siders these Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance reports. The Stra­tegic Risk Register is a dynam­ic doc­u­ment. Risks will be removed when their like­li­hood of occur­rence and / or their poten­tial impact is assessed to have declined suf­fi­ciently through man­age­ment and imple­ment­a­tion of mit­ig­a­tion or cir­cum­stances change in the Authority’s wider oper­at­ing envir­on­ment. The cur­rent ver­sion of the stra­tegic risk register is set out for con­sid­er­a­tion as an Annex to this paper.

3. Respond­ing to feed­back from intern­al audit, the risk register now ana­lyses the pro­posed risk mit­ig­a­tion actions between ​“pre­vent­at­ive” and ​“remedi­al” action: respect­ively estab­lish­ing man­age­ment activ­it­ies designed to pre­vent the risk from tak­ing hap­pen­ing and seek­ing to min­im­ise the impact of a risk should it occur. This cat­egor­isa­tion is inten­ded to assist the Board and Man­age­ment Team bet­ter assess the adequacy of actions pro­posed to man­age risk.

4. The Board are invited at this point to review the cur­rent ver­sion of the Stra­tegic Risk Register; identi­fy any poten­tial stra­tegic risks not cur­rently included; com­ment on the draft assess­ment of sig­ni­fic­ance of risks iden­ti­fied and adequacy of pro­posed mitigation.

Implic­a­tions

1. Both the Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance Mon­it­or­ing Frame­work and Stra­tegic Risk Register have been developed with a view to man­aging and lim­it­ing the staff time resource required to sup­port the admin­is­tra­tion of these pro­cesses, while ensur­ing that the pro­cesses them­selves are fit for pur­pose in man­aging risk to which the Author­ity is exposed and meas­ur­ing our suc­cess in achiev­ing agreed cor­por­ate pri­or­it­ies. We are aim­ing to make best use of data already col­lec­ted by ourselves and our part­ners and hence tap into exist­ing work rather than cre­ate new, often costly, data col­lec­tion pro­cesses. Some indic­at­ors have data col­lec­ted annu­ally or over longer peri­ods. There­fore not all indic­at­ors will change over the peri­od since these mon­it­or­ing reports were last presen­ted to the Board.

2. Our stra­tegic risk man­age­ment pro­cess and prac­tices build on exist­ing meth­ods already reviewed and approved by Audit & Risk Com­mit­tee and eval­u­ated by intern­al and extern­al audit. Our stra­tegic plan­ning and cor­por­ate per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing report­ing was also sub­ject to intern­al audit review as part of the ²⁰¹⁸⁄₁₉ intern­al audit pro­gramme and received a ​“clear” intern­al audit report. The intern­al aud­it­ors, BDO, gave a ​“sub­stan­tial” (highest) rat­ing to both the design and oper­a­tion­al effect­ive­ness of these per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing processes.

3. Our risk man­age­ment pro­cesses require staff to ref­er­ence the agreed stra­tegic risks in devel­op­ing spe­cif­ic strategies and policies and tail­or their plans accord­ingly, to both ensure these policies and strategies are not impacted by the recog­nised risks and also help man­age these risks.

4. In tak­ing for­ward actions and pro­jects to help deliv­er Cor­por­ate Plan pri­or­it­ies, Dir­ect­ors and their Heads of Ser­vice are expec­ted to ensure that oper­a­tion­al plans and / or pro­ject plans where required are covered by more spe­cif­ic risk registers and risk man­age­ment practices.

Suc­cess Measures

1. Imple­ment­a­tion of an effect­ive Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance Mon­it­or­ing Sys­tem is an essen­tial com­pon­ent of enabling iden­ti­fic­a­tion of suc­cess in deliv­ery of the Board’s agreed Cor­por­ate Plan.

2. Effect­ive risk man­age­ment pro­cesses ensure that risks that may impact on suc­cess are iden­ti­fied, man­aged and / or mon­itored appro­pri­ately to sup­port deliv­ery of Cor­por­ate object­ives. Risk man­age­ment pro­cesses also assist in eval­u­at­ing oppor­tun­it­ies for action and in determ­in­ing the Authority’s approaches to most effect­ively real­ising those opportunities.

3. The work in bring­ing these pro­cesses togeth­er there­fore forms a key aspect of the Authority’s stra­tegic man­age­ment processes.

4. The pro­gress shown in the Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive updates are them­selves present­ing the suc­cess meas­ures in the Authority’s deliv­er of its approved cor­por­ate objectives.

Sup­port­ing Information:

Update on Cor­por­ate Plan Monitoring

1. A sum­mary of the Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan mon­it­or­ing inform­a­tion is presen­ted in Annex 1. Cor­por­ate KPIs com­ple­ment­ing the qual­it­at­ive updates on per­form­ance are set out in Annex 2 presen­ted with this paper. A com­ment­ary on the cur­rent status of these KPIs is also presen­ted. More inform­a­tion on the high­lights and issues arising over the course of Cor­por­ate Plan deliv­ery to date is presen­ted in the fol­low­ing sec­tions of this paper.

Con­ser­va­tion and Land Man­age­ment — Highlights

1. Work con­tin­ues to pro­gress rel­at­ively well across all pri­or­it­ies with­in the Con­ser­va­tion and Land Man­age­ment ele­ments of the Plan. A num­ber of indic­at­ors around key work areas con­tin­ue to be assessed as ​“amber” in the risk rat­ing either as a con­sequence of assess­ment data still to be sourced, or per­form­ance to date fall­ing slightly below tar­get levels

2. While the Author­ity con­tin­ues to be suc­cess­ful in secur­ing fund­ing for our work on peat­land action, the 1,565 hec­tares covered by cur­rent pro­ject activ­it­ies or under feas­ib­il­ity remains below the 1,000 hec­tares each year tar­get for peat­land res­tor­a­tion set in the cor­por­ate plan. This is mainly around con­tract­or capa­city and times­cale issues.

3. Sim­il­arly, work on forestry is pro­gress­ing while estim­ated data sug­gests that actu­al plant­ing of areas of new wood­lands is roughly on tar­get to meet the 1,000 hec­tares per year.

Con­ser­va­tion and Land Man­age­ment – Excep­tion Reporting

1. Wild­life crime con­tin­ues to be high­lighted as an excep­tion in this round of per­form­ance report­ing, as incid­ents con­tin­ue to occur in the Park. The rap­tor track­ers developed jointly with BTO and SNH will be deployed in 2020.

Vis­it­or Exper­i­ence — Highlights

1. Four of five KPIs in this area of the Authority’s cor­por­ate plan activ­ity are cur­rently assessed as on track and ​“green” in our risk based assess­ments of progress.

2. Fund­ing and plan­ning con­sents have now been secured to com­plete con­struc­tion of the Spey­side Way exten­sion in 2019 with an open­ing in Spring 2020. Work is pro­gress­ing with New­ton­more on installing a start/​finish sculp­ture in the village

3. The Moun­tains and The People Pro­ject, led by the Out­door Access Trust for Scot­land, have now com­pleted around 84% of planned path upgrades in the Cairngorms part of the project.

4. The Volun­teer Ranger pro­ject con­tin­ues to be suc­cess­ful, meet­ing all of its LEAD­ER fund­ing tar­gets hav­ing trained 26 volun­teers to date with 12 more volun­teers sched­uled for train­ing in Spring 2020 as com­pared with an annu­al tar­get of 8 trained volun­teer rangers.

5. CNPA now has ten part­ner­ship agree­ments with Loc­al Inform­a­tion Centres provid­ing inform­a­tion for vis­it­ors to the Nation­al Park

Vis­it­or Exper­i­ence – Excep­tion Reporting

1. The cur­rent inter­rup­tion to ser­vice at Cairngorm Moun­tain remains a key issue for the Cairngorms vis­it­or infra­struc­ture and tour­ism eco­nomy. We are work­ing as closely as pos­sible with High­lands and Island Enter­prise (HIE) and oth­er stake­hold­ers on this mat­ter, and review­ing the wider impacts of this on the Cairngorm and Glen­more Strategy, while recog­nising that HIE are very much in the lead in plan­ning for the future of Cairngorm Mountain.

2. Cur­rent STEAM data indic­ates that the tour­ism impact in the south­ern and east­ern areas of the Cairngorms Nation­al Park is declin­ing from pri­or year levels rather than increas­ing toward the tar­get of 25% of the total vis­it­or economy.

Rur­al Devel­op­ment — Highlights

1. Fol­low­ing com­ple­tion of the con­sulta­tion on the pro­posed Loc­al Devel­op­ment Plan in April, the Board form­ally approved responses in August 2019. The respect­ive ​‘Sched­ule 4’ doc­u­ments have now been sub­mit­ted to Depart­ment of Plan­ning and Envir­on­ment­al Appeals for exam­in­a­tion. We expect to get con­firm­a­tion of the timetable for the Exam­in­a­tion in near future.

2. The con­sulta­tion on the Eco­nom­ic Action Plan took place between July and Septem­ber 2019. Over the sum­mer peri­od, the Con­vener and loc­al Board mem­bers met with over 50 busi­nesses on a one-to-one basis to listen to views about how the eco­nomy was work­ing with­in the Park. Meet­ings also took place with sev­er­al busi­ness asso­ci­ations and with organ­isa­tions such as the Cairngorms Busi­ness Part­ner­ship and envir­on­ment­al NGOs. A sum­mary of views received will be presen­ted to the Board in Decem­ber along with the final Eco­nom­ic Action Plan for approval.

3. CNPA’s objec­tion to the Dalraddy to Slo­chd sec­tion of the A9 has been main­tained due to lack of pro­vi­sion for non-motor­ised users. Pre-Inquiry meet­ing is due to take place on 3 Decem­ber. Mean­while CNPA is work­ing with TS on pro­pos­als for new off road cycle route between Car­rbridge and Aviemore.

4. The Cairngorms LEAD­ER Pro­gramme has now achieved full com­mit­ment of its pro­gramme funds alloc­a­tion, and the Cairngorms Trust, lead­ing the pro­gramme, has suc­cess­fully bid for £67k addi­tion­al fund­ing alloc­a­tion from resources recovered from oth­er LEAD­ER areas (2.3% increase on ori­gin­al pro­gramme alloc­a­tion) to fin­ance addi­tion­al pro­ject activ­it­ies. The Cairngorms LEAD­ER pro­gramme includes fund­ing of almost £1.5 mil­lion of eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and farm diver­si­fic­a­tion pro­ject value sup­port­ing pro­jects tar­get­ing eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment actions with­in the Cairngorms. The LEAD­ER pro­gramme has also delivered one of the Authority’s cor­por­ate KPIs of num­bers of people enter­ing com­munity devel­op­ment activ­it­ies for the first time, with mon­it­or­ing stat­ist­ics show­ing 237 people get­ting involved in such vol­un­tary com­munity activ­it­ies for the first time.

Rur­al Devel­op­ment – Excep­tion Reporting

1. There are no excep­tions to report on Rur­al Devel­op­ment at this point.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions

1. The Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Annu­al Review ²⁰¹⁸⁄₁₉ has been pub­lished on our web­site along with the Annu­al Accounts which were laid in Par­lia­ment dur­ing week com­men­cing 11 Novem­ber. A con­sulta­tion on the Eco­nom­ic Action Plan is com­plete and the plan has been final­ised for Board approv­al. The Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan Annu­al Review was pub­lished in an e‑storybook format which has been very successful.

2. The Min­is­ter for Rur­al Affairs and the Nat­ur­al Envir­on­ment, Mairi Gougeon, launched the Cairngorms Youth Action Group on 7^th Octo­ber and the Deputy First Min­is­ter and Cab­in­et Sec­ret­ary for Edu­ca­tion and Skills, John Swin­ney, in his con­stitu­ency MSP capa­city, reopened the Beinn a’Ghlo path near Blair Atholl on 27^th Septem­ber 2019.

3. Bòrd na Gàidh­lig approved the second iter­a­tion of the CNPA’s Gael­ic Lan­guage Plan and our annu­al pro­gress report for ²⁰¹⁸⁄₁₉ has been pub­lished on our website.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions – Excep­tion Reporting

1. There are no excep­tions to report on Com­mu­nic­a­tions at this point.

Cor­por­ate Ser­vices — Organ­isa­tion­al Development

1. The great major­ity of Cor­por­ate KPIs are shown in Annex 2 to be achiev­ing tar­gets approved by the Board. Only 2 of 17 KPIs show aspects of activ­ity not achiev­ing or ahead of target.

2. There are cur­rently no work related causes of absence under man­age­ment, address­ing an excep­tion repor­ted to the Board in June 2019 when there were two cases under man­age­ment. There has also been no RIDDOR report­able Health and Safety incid­ents in the peri­od, which also brings anoth­er KPI high­lighted as an excep­tion in June back into line with targets.

3. The office exten­sion pro­ject was nom­in­ated for an Archi­tects Journ­al design award in Autumn 2019 to fol­low the nom­in­a­tion from the Roy­al Incor­por­a­tion of Archi­tects in Scot­land. The Archi­tects lead­ing on design, Mox­on Archi­tects, also com­mis­sioned a car­bon emis­sion assess­ment for the pro­ject devel­op­ment which high­lights that the use of Cross Lam­in­ated Tim­ber in con­struc­tion rather than rein­forced con­crete for a build­ing of sim­il­ar size gives a sav­ing in car­bon emis­sions of 166 tonnes of CO2 equi­val­ent – equi­val­ent to a car jour­ney of 20,746km. This car­bon sav­ings also equates to oper­a­tion­al car­bon emis­sions from use of the build­ing for equi­val­ent of 47 years.

4. In work­ing toward our Cor­por­ate Plan aspir­a­tion of becom­ing the best small pub­lic sec­tor organ­isa­tion in Scot­land, our IT Appren­tice as one of four short­l­is­ted nom­in­ees for High­land Busi­ness Awards Appren­tice of the Year.

5. Our audited accounts for ²⁰¹⁸⁄₁₉ gave an on budget break-even pos­i­tion while our fin­an­cial pos­i­tion for the cur­rent year also is on track to achieve the same res­ult for ²⁰¹⁹⁄₂₀.

6. It is worth high­light­ing that while our work to con­tin­ue to reduce car­bon emis­sions from the Authority’s busi­ness activ­it­ies remains ahead of tar­get and is assessed as ​“green”, there has been a year on year increase in emis­sions. This has been invest­ig­ated and is the res­ult of a one-off spike in air travel linked to spe­cif­ic, time-lim­ited oper­a­tion­al activ­it­ies. The long-term trend in our emis­sions from the Authority’s busi­ness activ­it­ies con­tin­ues to be down­ward, with fur­ther invest­ment in pool vehicles planned for late in ²⁰¹⁹⁄₂₀ which will fur­ther reduce vehicle based emissions.

Organ­isa­tion­al Devel­op­ment – Excep­tion Report

1. We do have one instance in the peri­od of a com­plaint sit­ting at front­line res­ol­u­tion for longer than allowed under our policies. This is some­thing of a tech­nic­al lapse as the com­plaint was resolved by let­ter with­in 13 days (com­pared to a max­im­um of 20). The omis­sion in pro­ced­ure being the lack of noti­fic­a­tion to the com­plain­ant that their issue was being fully invest­ig­ated and that the mat­ter had there­fore been escal­ated to a full com­plaint investigation.

2. While not a KPI in its own right, the Author­ity has been judged by the Scot­tish Inform­a­tion Com­mis­sion­er to have only par­tially respon­ded to a Free­dom of Inform­a­tion request: a mat­ter worth not­ing when review­ing our cor­por­ate per­form­ance. The judge­ment was made in these terms as, although the Com­mis­sion­er found that all inform­a­tion in scope of the request had been vol­un­tar­ily provided by the time their invest­ig­a­tion pro­cess had com­pleted and no fur­ther action was required, all rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion had not been iden­ti­fied and provided pri­or to the mat­ter being referred to the Com­mis­sion­er. There­fore, only an assess­ment of ​“par­tial com­pli­ance” was con­sidered war­ran­ted by the Com­mis­sion­er. The mat­ter has been reviewed intern­ally. We are con­tent that the cir­cum­stances around this case led to the short­com­ings in iden­ti­fic­a­tion of inform­a­tion in scope of the request and such cir­cum­stances are highly unlikely to occur again. There are no assessed fail­ures or gaps in policy or pro­ced­ures con­trib­ut­ing to this case.

Cor­por­ate KPIs and Cross-cut­ting Indicators

1. Cor­por­ate KPIs com­ple­ment­ing the qual­it­at­ive updates on per­form­ance are set out in Annex 2 presen­ted with this paper. A com­ment­ary on the cur­rent status of these KPIs is also presented.

2. The update on KPIs has been graded on this occa­sion in risk terms.

Stra­tegic Risk Management

1. The Stra­tegic Risk Register is presen­ted at Annex 3 to this paper. This sets out the most recent apprais­al of the Authority’s stra­tegic risk man­age­ment by the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee in Octo­ber 2019 and by Man­age­ment Team in Novem­ber 2019.

Dav­id Camer­on, on behalf of Man­age­ment Team and Oper­a­tion­al Man­age­ment Group 18 Novem­ber 2019 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk