210514FinanceCtteePaper2AABudgetUpdateV02

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY Fin­ance & Deliv­ery Com­mit­tee Paper 2 14/05/21

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY FIN­ANCE & DELIV­ERY COMMITTEE

FOR DIS­CUS­SION

Title: POS­I­TION PAPER ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ BUDGETS Pre­pared by: DANIEL RAL­PH, FIN­ANCE MAN­AGER DAV­ID CAMER­ON, DIR­ECT­OR OF COR­POR­ATE SERVICES

Pur­pose To present an update on the ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ budget approved in March 2021

Recom­mend­a­tions The Fin­ance & Deliv­ery Com­mit­tee is reques­ted to:

a) note the ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ budget update.

Exec­ut­ive Summary

1. This paper updates the Fin­ance com­mit­tee on the impact on the cur­rent year, ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ budget, at this early stage in the year of year-end fin­an­cial man­age­ment actions. The paper also sets out payroll costs for April, month I in the new fin­an­cial year, to provide assur­ance on the robust­ness of that sig­ni­fic­ant ele­ment of budget. Finally, the paper provides a brief update on Peat­land Recov­ery funding.

²¹⁄₂₂ Budget

1. Year-end fin­an­cial man­age­ment, seek­ing to max­im­ise use of avail­able resources in ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁, sup­por­ted pay­ments ori­gin­ally planned for ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ to be advanced into ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ with a total value of £78,000. These enhance­ments to resource avail­able in ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ are off­set by addi­tion­al one off soft­ware costs to be shared by the Com­mu­nic­a­tions and Stra­tegic Plan­ning ser­vices of £18,000 to sup­port NPPP and oth­er con­sulta­tion pro­cesses, plus the addi­tion­al £26,000 implic­a­tion of the late amend­ment to Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment Pub­lic Sec­tor Pay Policy repor­ted to the Board at its March budget set­ting meet­ing. Over­all changes in budget pos­i­tion at this early point of ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ are sum­mar­ised below:

£ Accel­er­ated Payments Con­ser­va­tion 18,000 Vis­it­or ser­vices 5,000 Rur­al Devel­op­ment 55,000 78,000

Added Cost Pressures Com­mu­nic­a­tions / stra­tegic plan­ning (18,000) con­sulta­tion soft­ware Added cost of pay award (26,000) Poten­tial budget sur­plus £34,000

1. Con­sequently addi­tion­al budget avail­able in ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ to sup­port the deliv­ery of our stra­tegic object­ives is £34,000. These budget vari­ations arise at a very early stage of the fin­an­cial year, and while they present a pos­it­ive over­all out­look of the poten­tial for addi­tion­al resource avail­ab­il­ity to be inves­ted, we do not pro­pose that redis­tri­bu­tion decisions should be taken at this stage. It is also a rel­at­ively small sum of over­all variation.

2. The Author­ity has com­menced work on our ​“new nor­mal” pro­gramme to estab­lish means by which we will recon­fig­ure our work­ing arrange­ments as we move out of Busi­ness Con­tinu­ity Plan­ning around COVID19 con­trols. There are likely to be addi­tion­al cost pres­sures arising from this pro­gramme of work once work streams have had an oppor­tun­ity to identi­fy and agree actions required and any invest­ment to sup­port deliv­ery of this pro­gramme and a resump­tion of office use under a range of remod­elled work­ing pro­ced­ures. As such, we pro­pose that these addi­tion­al resources be held at this stage as con­tin­gency cov­er for our pri­or­ity organ­isa­tion­al devel­op­ment work.

Staff Costs

1. The staff budget approved for the ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ fin­an­cial year is £4,102,000. Although only one month into the new fin­an­cial year the month I salary costs were £314,600, (before any recov­ery from pro­jects) com­pared to an aver­age budgeted monthly staff costs of £341,800. Costs cur­rently are there­fore well with­in budget expectations.

2. The April staff costs exclude the vol­un­tary Exit pay­ments which were accoun­ted for in ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ and the 4 staff mem­bers who took the vol­un­tary exist have now left the Authority.

3. April costs also exclude a range of recruit­ment activ­ity under­way on Ranger Ser­vices and Peat­lands, plus oth­er ser­vices. The staff pay award to be imple­men­ted with effect from I April is also still to be pro­cessed. Monthly staff­ing costs will there­fore rise in future months. Inform­a­tion from the first month of the year does con­firm that there are no unex­pec­ted budget pres­sures from staff levels, with the poten­tial that there may be some sur­plus budget to con­sider real­loc­a­tion once the pos­i­tion nor­m­al­ises fol­low­ing key recruitment.

4. It has also now been con­firmed that there will be no increase in Employer’s pen­sion con­tri­bu­tion before 2024. There­fore, this budget­ing assump­tion for ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ is now confirmed.

Peat­land Restoration

1. Con­firm­a­tion of the ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ set­tle­ment for Peat­land Recov­ery is still to be received and will be added to the annu­al Grant-in-Aid alloc­a­tion in the autumn Budget Revi­sions (approx­im­ately £2,163,000.) This con­firm­a­tion will cov­er both Cap­it­al and Resource alloc­a­tions for ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ and will allow plan­ning of the cur­rent year’s Peat­land res­tor­a­tion work.

2. Addi­tion­ally, we expect that a multi-year cap­it­al set­tle­ment will be con­firmed which will make future plan­ning much easi­er. It is unlikely that a multi-year resource set­tle­ment will be agreed over the course of the cur­rent year, and this is in line with cur­rent Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment prac­tice of single year resource set­tle­ments. There is likely, there­fore, to be some mis­match between the dur­a­tion of staff con­tracts with the con­firmed resource fund­ing set­tle­ments cov­er­ing those con­tracts. Man­age­ment are aware that the Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment offi­cials lead­ing this pro­gramme nation­ally are fully under­stand­ing of the need for staff­ing, fun­ded by resource alloc­a­tions, to under­pin deliv­ery of the cap­it­al works. Nation­al resource level fund­ing accounts for only 15% of the full costs of Peat­land Res­tor­a­tion. As such, man­age­ment believe the like­li­hood of resource alloc­a­tions not being made to under­pin the com­mit­ment to cap­it­al invest­ment in Peat­land Res­tor­a­tion is very low. Evid­ence also sug­gests that a recruit­ment tar­geted at one-year fixed term con­tracts will in this area of work will not be suc­cess­ful. As such, the intent is to explore recruit­ment for staff on a three year con­tract on this risk-man­aged basis.

Daniel Ral­ph danielralph@​cairngorms.​co.​uk Dav­id Camer­on davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk 3 May 2021