220812ResourcesCtteePaper1AABudget Monitoring 2223

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY Resources Com­mit­tee Paper | 12^th August 2022

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY RESOURCES COMMITTEE

FOR DIS­CUS­SION

Title: ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ BUDGET MONITORING

Pre­pared by: DAV­ID CAMER­ON, DIR­ECT­OR OF COPOR­ATE SERVICES

Pur­pose This paper presents an over­view of the Cairngorms NPA’s budget man­age­ment pos­i­tion at the end of the first quarter of the ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ fin­an­cial year, as at 30 June 2022.

Recom­mend­a­tions The Resources Com­mit­tee is asked to: a) Con­sider the budget man­age­ment pos­i­tion for ²⁰²²⁄₂₃;

Over­view

1. Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment has announced an in-year budget review exer­cise and flagged to all pub­lic bod­ies an expect­a­tion that a 2% reduc­tion in ori­gin­al grant in aid alloc­a­tions may be required. The Cairngorms NPA, in com­mon with all oth­er pub­lic bod­ies fun­ded by gov­ern­ment, have also been asked to review their level of fin­an­cial com­mit­ment and identi­fy areas of expendit­ure not yet con­trac­tu­ally com­mit­ted. Officers have sup­plied this inform­a­tion and at the time of writ­ing this report await any feed­back from that exer­cise. The budget mon­it­or­ing fig­ures presen­ted in and with this paper reflect the expect­a­tion of a 2% reduc­tion in grant in aid fund­ing from the Nation­al Parks budget line — £129,000 reduc­tion for the Authority.

2. Des­pite this reduc­tion in grant, the first quarter fin­an­cial pos­i­tion con­tin­ues to sup­port pro­jec­tion of a break-even out­turn pos­i­tion as tar­geted in the Authority’s approved budget for ²⁰²²⁄₂₃.

3. The detail of the fin­an­cial mon­it­or­ing pos­i­tion is set out in Annex One to this paper.

Staff and Board

1. After imple­ment­a­tion and back-dat­ing of ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ pay award, our actu­al expendit­ure against salar­ies budget remains in a favour­able pos­i­tion with an under­spend of £77,554 at the end of Q1: equi­val­ent to 7.1% of the £1.091m budget. While there is expect­a­tion that this level of under­spend will reduce as more planned recruit­ment is com­pleted over the course of the year, there is a reas­on­able expect­a­tion that up to

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY Resources Com­mit­tee Paper | 12^th August 2022

£200,000 of this budget may be avail­able for real­loc­a­tion to sup­port oper­a­tion­al plan investment.

Pro­gramme Management

1. All expec­ted pro­gramme man­age­ment costs have been recovered from extern­al funds as expec­ted. There are no budget excep­tions to report.

Run­ning Costs

1. All run­ning costs are broadly in line with budget expectations.

2. There is a small excess of expendit­ure against phased budget for oth­er staff costs in QI, as a con­sequence of early com­mit­ment to a num­ber of train­ing courses. There are no iden­ti­fied pres­sures which may lead to an over­spend at the end of the year at this stage.

3. Oth­er areas of run­ning costs are cur­rently slightly below phased budget pos­i­tion, off­set­ting the oth­er staff costs pos­i­tion and bring­ing over­all run­ning costs at the end of QI to £5,000 in excess of budget, equi­val­ent to 2.3%. Out­turn pro­jec­tions remain in line with full year budget.

Oper­a­tion­al Plan

1. The oper­a­tion­al plan budgeted invest­ment for QI is rel­at­ively low, with most fin­an­cial activ­ity pro­filed from Q2 and heav­ily into Q3 and Q4 of the fin­an­cial year. Most oper­a­tion­al plan areas have actu­al expendit­ure slightly ahead of the pro­filed budget pos­i­tion for QI, lead­ing to an over­all pos­i­tion of £86,600 expendit­ure ahead of budget profile.

2. How­ever, actu­al expendit­ure is only 2.8% of total budget for the year and there­fore any vari­ation between actu­al expendit­ure and budget at this stage of the year is neg­li­gible in terms of poten­tial impact on out­turn position.

3. As is typ­ic­al in our man­age­ment of the oper­a­tion­al plan, the emphas­is remains on con­vert­ing com­mit­ted plans into actu­al expendit­ure in line with expectations.

4. While the pos­i­tion against the peat­land pro­gramme is par­tic­u­larly low in com­par­is­on with full year budget, a num­ber of grant con­tracts have now been issued and agreed for the year, with cap­it­al com­mit­ments now at around £Im.

Dav­id Camer­on 03 August 2022 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk