200522DraftFinanceCtteeMinutesV03

DRAFT MINUTES OF THE FIN­ANCE AND DELIV­ERY COM­MIT­TEE MEET­ING of THE CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY held via Lifes­ize Video Con­fer­en­cing, on 22 May 2020 at 1.45pm

PRESENT

Wil­li­am Mun­ro (Chair) lan McLar­en (Vice-Chair) Elean­or Mackintosh

John Kirk Anne Rae Mac­don­ald Xan­der McDade

In Attend­ance: Grant Moir, CEO Dav­id Camer­on, Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Ser­vices Danie Ral­ph, Fin­ance Man­ager Alix Hark­ness, Clerk to the Board

Apo­lo­gies: None

Wel­come and Apologies

1. Every­one was wel­comed to the meeting.

Minutes of Last Meet­ing – Approval

1. The draft Minutes of the meet­ings on 6 March 2020 were approved the fol­low­ing amend­ment: a) Ref­er­ence to Fin­ance & Deliv­ery Com­mit­tee meet­ing Chair to be changed to ​‘Chair’ through­out doc­u­ment as he is some­times referred to as ​‘Con­vener’ and this may cause confusion.

Mat­ters Arising

1. The Chair provided an update on the Action Points from the pre­vi­ous meet­ing includ­ing: a) At Para 13i) – In Hand – Out­door Access Trust for Scot­land (OATS) to be asked to more expli­citly reflect the com­mit­ment to path main­ten­ance, poten­tially by adding the words “…and main­tain as appro­pri­ate” at the end of

the sen­tence of the pro­posed Art­icles of Asso­ci­ation. Officers repor­ted they had writ­ten to OATS to com­mu­nic­ate these requests, and Pete Crane had sep­ar­ately agreed to write on memo of art­icles and will report back when hear reply. b) At Para 8i) – Closed — Left hand side descrip­tion of what the lines meant to be added to Annex I and for it to be recir­cu­lated and put on the web. Chair thanked officers for dis­char­ging this action, not­ing revised doc­u­ment that had been cir­cu­lated. c) At Para 15^d/​e) – In Hand — pay struc­ture in organ­isa­tion to be cir­cu­lated to the Com­mit­tee. Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Ser­vices agreed to do this.

1. Action:

i. Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Ser­vice to cir­cu­late the staff pay struc­ture to the Committee.

Declar­a­tion of Interests

1. Elean­or Mack­in­tosh declared an Indir­ect Interest in Paper 3 as she is a Board Mem­ber of Tomin­toul & Glen­liv­et Land­scape Part­ner­ship (TGLP).

Final Accounts Out­turn Sum­mary Pos­i­tion to Extern­al Audit (Paper 1)

1. Danie Ral­ph, Fin­ance Man­ager, intro­duced Paperl which presents a sum­mary over­view of the draft out­turn pos­i­tion for the fin­an­cial year ended 31 March 2020 as presen­ted to the extern­al auditors

2. The Fin­ance & Deliv­ery Com­mit­tee dis­cussed the paper and made the fol­low­ing com­ments and obser­va­tions: a) Could it be con­firmed that the £3.4 mil­lion was for pro­ject invest­ment. Fin­ance Man­ager con­firmed that it was, sup­por­ted by sig­ni­fic­ant inward invest­ment secured over the year to com­ple­ment Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment grant fund­ing. b) A Mem­ber com­men­ted that it was a power­ful fig­ure and con­grat­u­lated the team for deliv­er­ing on that. c) Com­ment made that the report was well presen­ted and suc­cinct. d) With ref­er­ence to para­graph 6 of the report, and the plus 1% to minus 2% out­turn tar­get, was this a tar­get set by the Author­ity or the Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment (SG)? Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Ser­vices advised that the per­form­ance meas­ures were pro­posed by the Author­ity and approved by the SG and that they formed an ele­ment of cor­por­ate per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing tar­gets estab­lished by and repor­ted to the Board. Com­ment made that the tar­gets were ambitious.

Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Ser­vices agreed that they were ambi­tious and this was an inev­it­able require­ment of seek­ing to estab­lish effect­ive and effi­cient man­age­ment of alloc­ated pub­lic fund­ing each year. The tar­gets were unlikely to be accept­able if set more flex­ibly than they were. Fin­ance Man­ager added that they under­go a reg­u­lar monthly budget mon­it­or­ing exer­cise with the SG Spon­sor Team. e) At Para 7, last year the audit pro­cess had been cum­ber­some and exten­ded in dur­a­tion. A mem­ber asked wheth­er the pro­cess had improved this year and wheth­er any dif­fi­culties were presen­ted by the pan­dem­ic. Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Ser­vices advised that they have tried to keep the extern­al audit pro­cess more focussed. There had been issues access­ing sys­tems and the pro­cess was still highly paper depend­ent. How­ever, the evid­ence gath­er­ing so far had been on track. How­ever, it was now estab­lished that the ori­gin­al accounts sign off date of June would not be achieved and officers would work with the audit man­ager to tar­get a Septem­ber approv­al date. Fin­ance Man­ager advised that with the ongo­ing audit pro­cess, we have met our dead­lines that have been set for pre­par­a­tion and sub­mis­sion of the accounts doc­u­ment and sup­port­ing work­ing papers and as such the Authority’s work was on track.

1. The Fin­ance & Deliv­ery Committee: a) Noted the pro­vi­sion­al out­turn pos­i­tion for expendit­ure against Grant in Aid alloc­a­tions presen­ted in the paper; b) Con­sidered wheth­er any fin­an­cial or gov­ernance issues arise from inform­a­tion presen­ted in the paper and noted there were no such issues.

2. Action: None.