CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

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 will be presen­ted at the Septem­ber board meeting.

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.

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

STRA­TEGIC RISK MAN­AGE­MENT AND MON­IT­OR­ING COR­POR­ATE PER­FORM­ANCE – FOR DISCUSSION

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).

4. This Cor­por­ate Plan deliv­ery update is presen­ted after four­teen 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 due to the impact of COV­ID 19.

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

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

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 cur­rent 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 has evolved con­sid­er­ably since that time. The 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.

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

There­fore not all indic­at­ors will change over the peri­od since these mon­it­or­ing reports were last presen­ted to the Board.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

Sup­port­ing Information:

Update on Cor­por­ate Plan Monitoring

1. A sum­mary of the Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan mon­it­or­ing inform­a­tion is presen­ted in Annex I. 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 Caper­cail­lie pro­ject has suc­cess­fully secured a fur­ther £2.9 mil­lion in fund­ing to deliv­er find­ings from the devel­op­ment phase of the pro­ject up until July 2023. Pro­ject funds are alloc­ated to loc­al com­munit­ies via devolved alloc­a­tions of up to £100,000 per com­munity, through com­mis­sion­ing innov­ate genet­ics and social sci­ence research, land man­age­ment con­tracts and dir­ectly employ­ing game­keep­ers, eco­lo­gists and pro­ject staff — all deliv­er­ing caper­cail­lie con­ser­va­tion across the Nation­al Park from July 2020 until July 2023.

2. Early indic­a­tions, based on draft wood­land cre­ation pro­pos­als on vari­ous estates across the CNP, sug­gests a tar­get of 1000 ha/​yr will be eas­ily achieved (pos­sibly twice over) across the next five year period.

3. Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment agree­ment for a three year cap­it­al fund­ing pack­age of £8.45m to deliv­er approx­im­ately 3,500 hec­tares of peat­land res­tor­a­tion is now in place. Cap­it­al fund­ing is con­firmed while the 15% of resource fund­ing sup­port­ing staff and oth­er in year costs remains on an annu­al fund­ing approv­al basis.

4. Com­pre­hens­ive Hab­it­ats Impacts Assess­ments (HIA) imple­men­ted for Dwarf Shrub Heath hab­it­ats across CNP and Move­ment towards devel­op­ment of Stra­tegic Land Man­age­ment Plan (incl. deer) agreed with West Grampi­an Deer Man­age­ment Group, with steer­ing group and inde­pend­ent chair­man appointed.

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 acquired with fund­ing from NatureScot will be deployed in Sum­mer 2021. Work with Police Scot­land and oth­er part­ners to try to reduce incid­ents is ongo­ing. Broad­er rap­tor work in the Park is being dis­cussed, includ­ing improved mon­it­or­ing, con­ser­va­tion pro­jects and ways of shift­ing the ​‘rap­tor cul­ture’ in parts of the Park.

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

1. 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. The Board are aware through pre­vi­ous dis­cus­sion that work is under­way with eco­nom­ic and skills devel­op­ment part­ners seek­ing to high­light and address the capa­city restric­tions impact­ing the peat­land res­tor­a­tion programme.

2. The Caper­cail­lie num­ber tar­get unlikely to be met and is now flagged as a red rated risk. Full nation­al sur­vey res­ults are due in 2022 but oth­er sur­veys sug­gest pop­u­la­tion has declined ser­i­ously from the 1100 birds estim­ated 2016.

Vis­it­or Exper­i­ence — Highlights

1. 51.8 km of path upgraded by Moun­tains & People pro­ject (ended Jan 2021) and 6.5 km of new path con­struc­ted along Spey­side Way Exten­sion & Sev­en Bridges path Bal­later. Fur­ther improve­ments to the route at Grant­own, Kin­craig & Tromie being developed in 2021. Both path cre­ation and path upgrade KPIs sought over the Cor­por­ate Plan peri­od are now achieved.

2. Full vis­it­or sur­vey data indic­ates 27% of vis­it­ors from C2, D & E cat­egor­ies which sig­ni­fic­antly exceeds the tar­get of 20% of vis­it­ors from these categories.

3. 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 Ranger Ser­vice to sup­port vis­it­or man­age­ment. The ranger ser­vice recruited dur­ing Feb­ru­ary 2021 was fully oper­a­tion­al dur­ing April 2021.

4. 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.

5. The tar­get level of volun­teer rangers trained over the cor­por­ate plan peri­od has also been achieved, des­pite the annu­al intake of volun­teer ranger train­ees for 2020 not being pos­sible as a con­sequence of COV­ID restrictions.

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

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

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.

1. 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.

2. John Muir Award com­ple­tions has been sig­ni­fic­antly impacted by Cov­id-19 restric­tions with 972 awards being com­pleted dur­ing 2020 sig­ni­fic­antly lower than over 2000 com­pleted dur­ing 2019.

3. The Volun­teer Ranger ser­vice has been impacted dur­ing Cov­id-19 with sus­pen­sion of activ­it­ies through­out much of 2020. How­ever Volun­teer ranger ser­vice has recently restar­ted with small activ­it­ies in May 2021.

Rur­al Devel­op­ment – Highlights

1. CNPA is also the highest rated pub­lic body (ongo­ing aver­age) of all those lis­ted in the Cairngorms Busi­ness Baro­met­er. CNPA was assessed by busi­nesses at 5.5 out of 10 which is above the aver­age score for all organ­isa­tions (5.28).

2. 56 afford­able homes have been com­pleted since March 2018 with a fur­ther 54 in construction.

Rur­al Devel­op­ment – Excep­tion Reporting

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

Com­mu­nic­a­tions — Highlights

1. 2020 saw an 11% increase in over­all users of the CNPA web­site com­bined with a 19% increase in Social Media fol­low­ers. This provided an estim­ated reach of nearly 7.5 million.

2. 5 year vis­it­or sur­vey con­firmed Cairngorms Nation­al Park as a top des­tin­a­tion with vis­it­or sat­is­fac­tion at an all-time high and 96% of vis­it­ors agree­ing that they ​‘love this place’.

3. Core theme and key mes­sages for each month of the year developed through a com­mu­nic­a­tions grid along­side the com­mu­nic­a­tion activ­it­ies: digit­al communications,

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 2 11^th June 2021

tra­di­tion­al media, stake­hold­er com­mu­nic­a­tions and events and is man­aged by the Man­age­ment Team and Organ­isa­tion­al Man­age­ment Group.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions – Excep­tion Reporting

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

Cor­por­ate Ser­vices — Organ­isa­tion­al Development

1. Cairngorms NPA was recog­nised this year as one of the Top 10 Flex­ible Organ­isa­tions in Scot­land, giv­ing sig­ni­fic­ant pub­lic and sec­tor­al recog­ni­tion to the work being under­taken through our Organ­isa­tion­al Devel­op­ment Strategy in build­ing an effect­ive organ­isa­tion while estab­lish­ing a pos­it­ive work / life bal­ance for our staff.

2. All posts agreed for recruit­ment were filled since last report­ing period.

Organ­isa­tion­al Devel­op­ment – Excep­tion Report

1. There are no Organ­isa­tion­al Devel­op­ment excep­tions to report at this time. Mem­bers’ atten­tion is drawn to the ​“amber” rated equal pay assess­ment KPI. The head­line assess­ment meth­od­o­logy we are required to report on con­tin­ues to show a nar­row­ing of the gap in gender pay levels and demon­strate the pos­it­ive impact of action taken. This head­line KPI does mask con­sid­er­able pro­gress made over the course of the last three years in this area of work. For example, the gender pay gap for Band D, our largest salary band with 31 staff, now has a gender pay gap of ‑2.5%; while the gender pay gap for part-time staff is now ‑5.62%.

Oth­er Cor­por­ate KPIs and Cross-cut­ting Indicators

1. Des­pite the range of COV­ID impacts and unusu­al scale of budget amend­ments approved, draft year-end fig­ures for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ fin­an­cial year indic­ate that fin­ances over the year have been suc­cess­fully man­aged with a small under-spend equat­ing to 0.6% of the total income of £7.035 mil­lion under man­age­ment in the year.

2. Fin­an­cial resources avail­able to the Author­ity for ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ are sig­ni­fic­antly ahead of the Cor­por­ate Plan projections.

3. Our car­bon emis­sions mod­el­ling high­lights a sig­ni­fic­ant reduc­tion in emis­sions over the course of the last year. Of course, the sus­pen­sion of the great major­ity of busi­ness related travel over the course of the year must be borne in mind at this point. Annu­al pro­gress pri­or to ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ on redu­cing our busi­ness related emis­sions has been pos­it­ive and we con­tin­ue to focus on the car­bon impacts of our oper­a­tions as we begin to devel­op the plans around mov­ing out of our busi­ness con­tinu­ity plan­ning phase into our ​“new nor­mal” oper­a­tion­al mode.

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CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

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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 Feb­ru­ary 2021 and by Man­age­ment Team in May 2021.

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 been reviewed reg­u­larly by the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee dur­ing ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁.

Vicky Walk­er, Dav­id Camer­on, on behalf of Man­age­ment Team and Oper­a­tion­al Man­age­ment Group 2^nd June 2021 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk