CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 | 11^th Septem­ber 2020

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 11 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).

4. This Cor­por­ate Plan deliv­ery update is presen­ted after five months of impacts from the COVID19 pan­dem­ic. The updates fea­ture a range of com­ment­ar­ies on the impacts which restric­tions on activ­ity imposed by responses to the pan­dem­ic have impacted on planned deliv­ery. Man­age­ment Team have been closely mon­it­or­ing the cap­ab­il­ity to con­tin­ue to deliv­er planned actions toward achieve­ment of the Authority’s agreed stra­tegic object­ives. The Annexes presen­ted along with this paper, and in par­tic­u­lar Annex 2 which sets out the Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors, presents an increas­ing num­ber of heightened ​“amber” rated risks around deliv­ery of stra­tegic out­comes. How­ever, at this point in time, none of the out­comes are high­lighted as not being deliv­er­able by the end of the Cor­por­ate Plan peri­od, 31 March 2022.

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. The Cairngorms Nature Part­ner­ship has been suc­cess­ful in draw­ing in over £100,000 in fund­ing for hab­it­at and spe­cies res­tor­a­tion projects.

2. The Caper­cail­lie pro­ject has also suc­cess­fully secured a fur­ther £2.9 mil­lion in fund­ing to deliv­er find­ings from the devel­op­ment phase of the project.

3. Work toward estab­lish­ing 1,000 hec­tares of new nat­ive wood­lands per annum has also pro­gressed well over the report­ing period.

4. 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 below tar­get levels as a con­sequence of COVID19 and oth­er imple­ment­a­tion delays.

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 NatureScot will now be deployed in 2021 at the earliest.

2. Peat­land res­tor­a­tion work, pre­vi­ously flagged as at escal­ated ​“amber” risk of deliv­ery, is now also high­lighted as at heightened red risk around deliv­ery of agreed tar­gets. The capa­city of con­tract­ors to under­take work has con­tin­ued to be a deliv­ery issue, while COVID19 restric­tions and budget restric­tions has effect­ively res­ul­ted in the loss of the 2020 ​“weath­er win­dow” to imple­ment peat­land works.

Vis­it­or Exper­i­ence — Highlights

1. Four of five KPIs in this area of the Authority’s cor­por­ate plan activ­ity remain assessed as on track and ​“green” in our risk based assess­ments of pro­gress, as they were at Decem­ber 2019 when the Board last received a pro­gress report.

2. In addi­tion to con­tinu­ing work in secur­ing the pri­or­ity out­comes in this area of the Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan, the organ­isa­tion has respon­ded to the COVID19 emer­gency by design­ing, recruit­ing, train­ing and imple­ment­ing a Sea­son­al Ranger Ser­vice between April and June 2020, with Sea­son­al Rangers start­ing on the ground at the begin­ning of July 2020. Feed­back has been very pos­it­ive over the two months of deliv­ery dur­ing a test­ing sum­mer season.

3. While COVID19 restric­tions have res­ul­ted in pauses in much of the deliv­ery work, object­ives remain broadly on track for deliv­ery by the close of the Cor­por­ate Plan peri­od. Work has also pro­gressed over the last months with the Cairngorms Trust in sup­port­ing the pro­cure­ment of elec­tric bikes to sup­port cli­mate change and Act­ive Cairngorms objectives.

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 con­tin­ue to work 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 also con­tin­ues to indic­ate that the tour­ism impact in the south­ern and east­ern areas of the Cairngorms Nation­al Park is declin­ing very slightly from pri­or year levels rather than increas­ing toward the tar­get of 25% of the total vis­it­or eco­nomy. The pos­i­tion remains an increase from the baseline fig­ure, although trend is down­ward rather than the tar­geted increase.

Rur­al Devel­op­ment — Highlights

1. The Exam­iners Report on the Cairngorms Loc­al Devel­op­ment Plan has now been received, mark­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant mile­stone on this sig­ni­fic­ant piece of work for the Authority.

2. Fol­low­ing con­sulta­tion on the Eco­nom­ic Action Plan July and Septem­ber 2019, the Board approved the Plan at its meet­ing in Decem­ber 2019.

3. In fur­ther work respond­ing to the COVID19 emer­gency, the Board approved a Green Recov­ery Plan for the Cairngorms Nation­al Park at its meet­ing in June 2020. Fol­low­ing on from this, one key action in the Plan, to imple­ment a Green Recov­ery Fund, has been designed and approved by the Board at a meet­ing in August 2020, with the Fund with a total value of £130,000 launched on 20 August.

4. The CNPA with­drew an objec­tion to the A9 Dalraddy to Slo­chd sec­tion in March 2020, fol­low­ing a com­mit­ment from Trans­port Scot­land to fund the devel­op­ment of an altern­at­ive non-motor­ised user route to link Aviemore and Carrbridge.

5. 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. One KPI – the level of busi­ness sat­is­fac­tion with the Author­ity – has moved to an increased amber risk rat­ing over the peri­od. The Authority’s sat­is­fac­tion score, while remain­ing above the aver­age level found in the most recent sur­vey fig­ures, has declined below the baseline level adop­ted at the com­mence­ment of the Cor­por­ate Plan.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions

1. CNPA’s Annu­al Report ²⁰¹⁹⁄₂₀ was sub­mit­ted to Min­is­ters and pub­lished on our web­site in July 2020 and a pro­gress report on the second iter­a­tion of the CNPA’s Gael­ic Lan­guage Plan was pub­lished on our web­site in August 2020.

2. In March (pre-lock­down) CNPA hos­ted the ​‘Net Zero with Nature’ con­fer­ence to address the cli­mate crisis and what needs to hap­pen in the Cairngorms Nation­al Park to tackle the issues.

3. At the start of the COVID19 pan­dem­ic response, the CNPA set up a Cairngorms Tour­ism Emer­gency Response Group. The group’s pur­pose is to provide con­sist­ent and com­pre­hens­ive ana­lys­is of the implic­a­tions of COVID19 for tour­ism, to coordin­ate com­mu­nic­a­tions with the tour­ism industry, ensure close work­ing between key agen­cies and the private sec­tor, to gath­er, share, facil­it­ate, inter­pret and dis­sem­in­ate inform­a­tion and agree rel­ev­ant actions and deliv­ery plans.

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 3 of 17 KPIs show aspects of activ­ity not achiev­ing or ahead of target.

2. The Cor­por­ate Ser­vices Group along with Com­mu­nic­a­tions col­leagues have led on the full scale imple­ment­a­tion and ongo­ing risk man­age­ment and review of the Authority’s busi­ness con­tinu­ity arrange­ments to respond to the COVID19 pandemic.

3. 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. The Man­age­ment Team have been very focused over the last 5 months of response to COV­ID on the men­tal health and well­being of staff. We have also under­taken two staff sur­veys to ensure we have feed­back from staff on their exper­i­ences of exten­ded remote work­ing and that we are aware of actions that we can take to improve their capa­city to inter­act with col­leagues and work effectively.

4. 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.

5. The office exten­sion pro­ject won an Archi­tects Journ­al design award, to fol­low the nom­in­a­tion from the Roy­al Incor­por­a­tion of Archi­tects in Scotland.

6. Our draft accounts for ²⁰¹⁹⁄₂₀ present an on budget, break-even pos­i­tion, while our fin­an­cial pos­i­tion for the cur­rent year also is on track to achieve the same res­ult for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁. The extern­al audit of the accounts is still under­way, while the aim is to present final accounts for approv­al at the Septem­ber 2020 Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee: a delay from the ori­gin­al plan of a June 2020 sign off as a con­sequence of COVID19 related delays.

7. Changes to oper­a­tion­al prac­tices and invest­ment in build­ings and our pool car fleet has also res­ul­ted in a sig­ni­fic­ant reduc­tion of 8.4 tonnes of CO2 in the last full oper­a­tion­al year from a pre­vi­ous level of 97.5 tonnes of CO2 – an single year reduc­tion of 8.6% in busi­ness related emis­sions com­pared with the annu­al tar­get of 3%.

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. We also have one instance of a recruit­ment activ­ity which did not res­ult in a suc­cess­ful recruitment.

3. Our equal pay ana­lys­is con­tin­ues to show a down­ward trend in assessed gender pay gap in line with tar­geted dir­ec­tion of travel, while the assessed pay gap remains a mat­ter for fur­ther action.

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 March 2020 and by Man­age­ment Team in August 2020.

2. The Author­ity has also developed a sep­ar­ate Busi­ness Con­tinu­ity Risk Man­age­ment approach and a sep­ar­ate busi­ness con­tinu­ity risk register asso­ci­ated with this approach to guide our actions as we con­tin­ue to adapt and respond to COVID19 impacts. This approach has also been reviewed by the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee. The latest update on the risk man­age­ment of our COVID19 responses is avail­able with papers for the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee meet­ing of 11 Septem­ber 2020.

Dav­id Camer­on, on behalf of Man­age­ment Team and Oper­a­tion­al Man­age­ment Group 27 August 2020 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk