220513PerformanceCtteePaper2AAPeatlandACTIONV02

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 2 13/05/2022

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY PER­FORM­ANCE COMMITTEE

FOR DIS­CUS­SION

Title: Cairngorms Peat­land ACTION Pro­gramme Pre­pared by: Steph­en Corcor­an, Peat­land ACTION Pro­gramme Manager

		Colin McLean, Head of Land Management

Pur­pose This paper presents the latest deliv­ery of the CNPA’s Peat­land ACTION Pro­gramme and the plans for deliv­ery this year.

Recom­mend­a­tions The Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee is asked to review the deliv­ery updates presen­ted with this paper and con­sider: a) wheth­er the pro­grammes of activ­ity are mak­ing the expec­ted con­tri­bu­tion to the Cairngorms NPA’s agreed stra­tegic out­comes; b) wheth­er the deliv­ery updates sug­gest any stra­tegic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant impacts on the Cairngorms NPA’s agreed per­form­ance object­ives; c) wheth­er any mater­i­al impacts on the Cairngorms NPA’s stra­tegic risk man­age­ment and mit­ig­a­tion meas­ures arise from assess­ment of pro­gramme delivery.

Per­form­ance Dashboard

Per­form­ance Meas­ure for 2021⁄22	Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
Fin­ance: max­im­ise use of £1.85 mil­lion cap­it­al fin­ance avail­able in 2021⁄22 for peat­land restoration	Green	Cur­rent tar­get deploy­ment of cap­it­al has been reduced to £1.408 mil­lion for 21⁄22 with agree­ment of Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment. Total year spend is being final­ised by the Fin­ance Team and should be close to this figure.
Fin­ance: impact on Cairngorms NPA budget management	Green	No wider unplanned demands cur­rently made by pro­gramme on fin­an­cial resources.
Area of restored peat­land: 557 hec­tare tar­get 2021⁄22	Green	Exceed hec­tares tar­get, deliv­er­ing 730ha of res­tor­a­tion man­age­ment, primar­ily due to a focus on easi­er drain block­ing work. The con­sequence of this res­ul­ted in a reduc­tion in spend as drain work is cheap­er. Cur­rent res­tor­a­tion man­age­ment tar­get for 2022⁄23 is 905ha.
Pro­gramme risk profile	Amber	Cur­rent con­tract­or capa­city uncer­tain to be able to meet future demand require­ments of the pro­gramme. New entrants scheme has brought on 4 con­tract­ors with exper­i­ence to under­take the sim­pler drain block­ing work.
Future fund­ing profile	Amber	Cap­it­al and resource fin­ance con­firmed by Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment for 2022⁄23 at £3.5m and £0.51m respect­ively. Con­tract­or and staff con­straints (the immin­ent depar­ture of the Pro­gramme Man­ager) are likely to lead to a con­tin­ued focus on drain block­ing in 2022⁄23. This means the cap­it­al budget is big­ger than we require. Pro­gramme assess­ment later this month will recom­mend a revised cap­it­al budget. The resource budget will enable us to increase capa­city with­in the Peat­land Action team.
Future deliv­ery profile	Amber	Fin­ance is in place to sup­port the work required to achieve a pro­gramme tar­get of 905ha. The depar­ture of the Pro­gramme Man­ager will reduce capa­city and the team will also have to focus on the res­ults of the Intern­al Audit and Pro­cess Map­ping. Addi­tion­al staff resources will be required to both replace the Pro­gramme Man­ager and to increase team capa­city if the tar­get is to be achieved. This recruit­ment is already under­way. A final sched­ule of pro­gramme deliv­ery has been pre­pared which takes capa­city issues into account, but which will still aim to achieve a tar­get of 905ha. The focus will be on the cheap­er and easi­er to man­age drain work.
Per­form­ance Meas­ure for 2021⁄22	Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
		Con­tract­or capa­city is expec­ted to be able to meet this target.

Stra­tegic Background

1. The peat­land pro­gramme will con­trib­ute to the deliv­ery of the tar­gets and pri­or­it­ies of the cur­rent Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan and the next plan. It is also key for assist­ing in the imple­ment­a­tion of the Her­it­age Hori­zon Cairngorms 2030 pro­ject, provid­ing the major­ity of the project’s matched fund­ing. The pro­gramme is sup­port­ing the deliv­ery of the Scot­tish Government’s peat­land res­tor­a­tion targets.
2. For this fin­an­cial year, ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂, the Peat­land Pro­gramme tar­get was to deliv­er 557 hec­tares of peat­land res­tor­a­tion man­age­ment sup­por­ted by £1.94 mil­lion (cap­it­al & resource costs) of Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment funding.
3. The Pro­gramme plans to deliv­er 905 hec­tares of peat­land res­tor­a­tion man­age­ment in ²⁰²²⁄₂₃, with fin­an­cial sup­port from Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment of £3.47 million.
4. The pro­grammes of activ­ity under con­sid­er­a­tion here also fit with the pri­or­it­ies of the cur­rent Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan (NPPP), the most recent over­view of deliv­ery of the NPPP hav­ing been presen­ted to the Board at its meet­ing in Septem­ber 2021: Meet­ing — Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity. The rel­ev­ant ele­ments of the NPPP deliv­ery relat­ing to these pro­grammes are: a) Land­scape scale res­tor­a­tion: 1(a) tar­get effort and sup­port to the most effect­ive oppor­tun­it­ies to deliv­er the pub­lic interest pri­or­it­ies such as wood­land improve­ment and expan­sion, peat­land res­tor­a­tion, flood risk man­age­ment (5,000 hec­tares of peat­land res­tor­a­tion management).

Per­form­ance Over­view: Deliv­ery Against Stra­tegic Expectations

1. The Peat­land Pro­gramme aimed to deliv­ery over 500 hec­tares of res­tor­a­tion man­age­ment in ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ and has exceeded this with 730 hec­tares of man­age­ment works, primar­ily drain block­ing, by the year end. This was pos­sible by extend­ing sev­er­al of the pro­ject site’s work areas, the rel­at­ively mild winter, and pro­jects on lower alti­tude sites.
2. The pro­gramme had reduced its cap­it­al budget by £442,000 in Decem­ber 2021 due to focus­ing deliv­ery on the cheap­er drain block­ing pro­jects rather than the more expens­ive act­ively erod­ing pro­jects. The final year end pos­i­tion is still to be cal­cu­lated and we are likely to have a mod­est under­spend of around £100,000 or less against the total cap­it­al budget of £1.31 mil­lion. Sev­er­al pro­jects were unable to com­plete by the year end due to factors out­side our con­trol: con­tract­or avail­ab­il­ity, winter weath­er on high­er alti­tude sites or delays in Peat­land Code regis­tra­tion (the lat­ter is a func­tion car­ried our by agents/​consultants and not CNPA staff). Sev­er­al pro­jects also came in under budget.
3. Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment have approved the £2.96m cap­it­al and £0.51m resource request for the Peat­land Pro­gramme for ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ as set out in detail in the pre­vi­ous paper to the Com­mit­tee. They have also indic­ated sup­port for the five-year budget and pro­gramme of works: £23.2 mil­lion and 6250 hec­tares of res­tor­a­tion man­age­ment for the peri­od 2022 – 2027.
4. Interest in peat­land res­tor­a­tion remains very high from land man­agers all across the Nation­al Park, much high­er than the avail­ab­il­ity of con­tract­ors or the staff resource with­in CNPA to support.
5. The Peat­land Code (see here for more inform­a­tion: https://www.iucn-uk-peatlandprogramme.org/peatland-code‑0) and car­bon fin­ance are increas­ing the interest in res­tor­a­tion and is requir­ing addi­tion­al work from the Peat­land team to sup­port pro­ject that go down this route. This can delay pro­gramme deliv­ery as pro­ject await Peat­land Code validation.
6. The intern­al audit, pro­cess map­ping and team devel­op­ment work­shops have all iden­ti­fied that staff in the team are at or work­ing bey­ond capa­city, and there is little scope to expand the pro­gramme of work. Addi­tion­al staff resources to increase capa­city will be required to achieve the 905 hec­tare tar­get being pro­posed for this year.
7. The New Entrant Train­ing pro­gramme for peat­land con­tract­ors, as repor­ted in the pre­vi­ous paper, was highly suc­cess­ful in bring­ing 4 new con­tract­ors to the works pro­gramme and train­ing them up to a stand­ard to deliv­ery high qual­ity drain block­ing work. On the back of this pro­gramme all four con­tract­ors won fur­ther work with us dur­ing ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂. It is planned to repeat the New Entrants Pro­gramme in ²⁰²²⁄₂₃, pos­sibly with a focus on pro­ject work in Deeside and High­land Perthshire

Per­form­ance Over­view: Risks Under Management

1. Staff resources to deliv­er the planned pro­gramme of work, and the future expan­sion of the pro­gramme are cur­rently inad­equate. In the short-term the staff resource issue is com­poun­ded by the Pro­gramme Man­ager leav­ing and the resource gap that leaves. In addi­tion, the GIS/​Data Officer has been on sick leave since early April put­ting addi­tion­al strain on the Pro­ject Officers and the abil­ity to deliv­er the pro­gramme. We will now act­ively recruit new staff to increase capa­city but, in the short term, capa­city will be reduced. The pro­gramme of work for ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ and the tar­get of 905ha has taken these capa­city issues into account.
2. A focus on cheap­er, easi­er to man­age, and deliv­er, drain block­ing work this year should enable the pro­gramme to approach the 905ha deliv­ery tar­get. How­ever, this does have implic­a­tions for the pro­gramme budget, and there is likely to be a sig­ni­fic­ant budget under­spend as pro­ject work moves away from the more expens­ive act­ively eroded peat­lands to the cheap­er drain block­ing peatland.
3. The Intern­al Audit of the pro­gramme was com­pleted in March and the final report is await­ing sign-off. The audit high­lighted sev­er­al risks to the Peat­land team provid­ing a ​‘full ser­vice’ approach to sup­port­ing deliv­ery with land man­agers that have not been fully con­sidered by the CNPA. The risks iden­ti­fied in the audit include leg­al, fin­an­cial, repu­ta­tion­al and resourcing. In addi­tion, there needs to be stronger stra­tegic dir­ec­tion of the peat­land pro­gramme from with­in the CNPA. A ​“Man­age­ment Action Plan” forms part of the audit, and the recom­mend­a­tions with­in this plan will be addressed over the next six months. This work will require addi­tion­al staff resources to deliver.

Con­clu­sions: Per­form­ance Over­view and Mat­ters Mer­it­ing Stra­tegic Review

1. The tar­get of 557ha of peat­land under res­tor­a­tion for ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ was exceeded and 730ha were achieved. A tar­get of 905ha has been set for ²⁰²²⁄₂₃. This tar­get takes staff and con­tract­or capa­city issues into account. Issues and risks raised by the Intern­al Audit will be addressed over the next six months. Addi­tion­al staff resources will be required to achieve both the res­tor­a­tion tar­get and the require­ments of the Intern­al Audit. The agreed Resource budget gives us some flex­ib­il­ity over recruit­ment. We are unlikely to require the full Cap­it­al budget to achieve target.

Colin McLean 9^th May 2022 colinmclean@​cairngorms.​co.​uk