230310CNPAPerfCtteePaper2PeatlandProgramme

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 2 10^th March 2023

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHOR­ITY PER­FORM­ANCE COMMITTEE

FOR DIS­CUS­SION

Title: CAIRNGORMS PEAT­LAND ACTION PROGRAMME

Pre­pared by: COLIN MCCLE­AN, HEAD OF LAND MANAGEMENT

Pur­pose This paper presents an update on the deliv­ery of the CNPA’s Peat­land ACTION pro­gramme for 2022 – 23.

Recom­mend­a­tion The Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee is asked to note the pro­gramme update.

Stra­tegic Background

1. The peat­land pro­gramme will con­trib­ute to the deliv­ery of the tar­gets and pri­or­it­ies of NPPP4. It is also key for assist­ing in the imple­ment­a­tion of the Her­it­age Hori­zon Cairngorms 2030 Pro­gramme, provid­ing the major­ity of the Programme’s planned match fund­ing for the deliv­ery phase com­men­cing mid 2023 sub­ject to bid approv­al. The pro­gramme is sup­port­ing the deliv­ery of the Scot­tish Government’s peat­land res­tor­a­tion targets.

Per­form­ance Dashboard

Per­form­ance Meas­ure for 2022⁄23	Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
Fin­ance: max­im­ise use of £2.962 mil­lion cap­it­al fin­ance avail­able in 2022⁄23 for peat­land restoration	Amber	Costs are not final­ised for some pro­jects but we estim­ate our cap­it­al expendit­ure is likely to be around £1.9 mill, leav­ing a cap­it­al under­spend of around £1 mill. We noti­fied Scot­Gov of our likely under­spend in Dec 22 and returned 700K at that point. We plan to return a fur­ther 200K in late Feb, leav­ing some head­room for unex­pec­ted costs.
Fin­ance: impact on Cairngorms NPA budget management	Green	No wider unplanned demands cur­rently made by pro­gramme on fin­an­cial resources.
Area of restored peat­land: 905 hec­tare tar­get 2022⁄23 (Res­tor­a­tion Area)	Green	Machines have fin­ished work on five pro­jects. With the hills largely snow free in early Feb­ru­ary, there are machines cur­rently on the ground on four estates. Sub­ject to weath­er, two pro­jects will re-start in late Feb fol­low­ing a 2 week break for snow to melt in gul­lies. Sub­ject to weath­er we hope to exceed 1000ha of peat­land under res­tor­a­tion this year and its pos­sible we may achieve more.
Pro­gramme risk profile	Green	Cur­rently we have suf­fi­cient con­tract­ors to tackle pro­jects and the weath­er in late January/​early Feb­ru­ary has been largely snow free. The tar­get of 905 ha in 2022⁄23 should be achieved, but a snowy March would reduce any addi­tion­al hec­tares achieved above the target.
Future fund­ing profile	Amber	We have a four year fund­ing pro­file agreed, albeit while con­tinu­ing to oper­ate with­in single year alloc­a­tions. We estim­ate we will need 3.7 mill cap­it­al budget in 2023⁄24 to ser­vice all pro­jects in our poten­tial pipeline. How­ever, this estim­ate can­not be exact as not all estates will ulti­mately choose to pro­ceed next year. The estim­ate of 3.7 mill is less than the 4.1 mil­lion alloc­ated in the future spend­ing pro­file, whilst with­in con­fid­ence lim­its allow­ing for con­tin­gency spending.
Future deliv­ery profile	Green	Landown­ers remain engaged with Peat­land Action and we have more than enough poten­tial pipeline pro­jects to fully alloc­ate the spend­ing pro­file with con­tin­gency built in. We will aim to deliv­er some pro­jects through dir­ect sup­port by Peat­land Officers and some by giv­ing sup­port to private sec­tor designers.

Tar­get for 2022 – 23

1. In 2022 – 23 we planned to deliv­er 905 hec­tares of peat­land res­tor­a­tion (Res­tor­a­tion Area). We are cur­rently on track to meet this tar­get, pos­sibly to exceed 1000ha if weath­er con­di­tions allow. Work is com­plete on five estates and is on-going on five oth­ers, con­tinu­ing on sev­er­al estates dur­ing a mild spell in mid Feb­ru­ary. The final amount of peat­land brought under res­tor­a­tion in ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ will not be known until Spring 23.

Fin­ance and staffing

1. Fin­an­cial sup­port from Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment is £3.4 mil­lion in ²⁰²²⁄₂₃. This com­prises £2.962m cap­it­al fund­ing (primar­ily sup­port­ing grant awards to land man­agers) and £0.505m resource fund­ing (sup­port­ing staff­ing and oth­er deliv­ery costs). As of Feb­ru­ary, CNPA has issued Grant Offers to 10 estates, rep­res­ent­ing a total of £1.896m com­mit­ted for pro­jects in ²⁰²²⁄₂₃.
2. In Decem­ber 2022 CNPA returned £0.70m of uncom­mit­ted cap­it­al alloc­a­tion to Scot­Gov as part of budget re-pro­fil­ing; retain­ing a con­tin­gency of £0.37m for infla­tion, unex­pec­ted costs and future anim­a­tion. Accru­als from ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ for 5 uncom­pleted pro­jects, totalling £0.129m, are not rep­res­en­ted in the ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ pro­gress table. It is expec­ted this work will be largely com­pleted by March 2023.
3. We have recruited a Train­ee Pro­ject officer who will start work in March. There were over 30 applic­ants for this post and some demon­strated a high level of know­ledge about peat­lands. This post will increase capa­city in the peat­land team but also recog­nises the skills short­age which exists in peat­land res­tor­a­tion. The aim is to train up the new pos­thold­er to Peat­land Officer level with­in 3 years.
4. We now have a highly skilled and motiv­ated Peat­land team. In order to scale up the peat­land res­tor­a­tion pro­gramme towards an annu­al tar­get of around 2000ha per year, the aim is to increase the num­ber of pro­jects that each of our Peat­land Officers deals with annu­ally. Cur­rently each Peat­land Officer works on 2 – 3 pro­jects per annum and this num­ber is lim­ited by the time needed to super­vise deliv­ery. We there­fore aim to increase private sec­tor input to pro­ject super­vi­sion and ulti­mately pro­ject design. Το that end we are work­ing with a range of part­ners eg Scot­tish Wood­lands to deliv­er a drain block­ing pro­ject on Tulchan of Glen­isla and Pal­la­di­um at Del­nadamph. We are also input­ting to the SRUC course on res­tor­a­tion design which should increase skills in the sec­tor in the longer term.
5. Dur­ing 2022 we seconded an employ­ee of RSPB to work with the Peat­land team. That second­ment has been suc­cess­ful but ends in March. Sally Phil­lips will now return to work for RSPB deliv­er­ing peat­land res­tor­a­tion on Aber­nethy hav­ing received a sol­id ground­ing in res­tor­a­tion tech­niques and peat­land pro­ject man­age­ment. There are some 1400ha of poten­tial peat­land res­tor­a­tion on Aber­nethy which will take many years to com­plete. CNPA dir­ect input to res­tor­a­tion on Aber­nethy will be reduced as a res­ult of this secondment.

6. In order to fur­ther scale up deliv­ery we will con­tin­ue to be flex­ible and innov­at­ive in devel­op­ing part­ner­ships between pub­lic and private sectors.

7. The 2021/2022 Azets Intern­al Audit of the peat­land pro­gramme con­trols and pro­cesses iden­ti­fied nine improve­ment actions. Four Grade 3 (amber) actions and one Grade 2 (yel­low) action have been imple­men­ted, three grade four (red) actions are ongo­ing and one Grade 3 (amber) has been assessed as not a pri­or­ity and is not yet star­ted. The three Grade four actions under­way are: a) A Ser­vice Level Agree­ment identi­fy­ing the roles and respons­ib­il­it­ies of CNPA, Peat­land Action grant applic­ants and con­tract­ors is cur­rently with leg­al advisors. This doc­u­ment is also import­ant in defin­ing the dif­fer­ent require­ments of Peat­land Action and Peat­land Code, set­ting out how the addi­tion­al require­ments of the Peat­land Code are to be met by the private sec­tor. b) A man­age­ment frame­work out­lining all con­trols, pro­cesses and doc­u­ment­a­tion from pre-applic­a­tion to pro­ject clos­ure is under review. This is a sig­ni­fic­ant, com­plex piece of work that will extend through­out 2023 c) An intern­al gov­ernance pro­cess is sched­uled to start in March, ensur­ing suf­fi­cient mon­it­or­ing and report­ing to man­age­ment on pro­ject pro­gress, with appro­pri­ate scru­tiny and fol­low up action taken when required.

Pro­gress to date on the pro­gramme for 2022 – 23.

	Annu­al tar­get (ha)	Fore­cast Pro­file (ha)	Work in pro­gress (ha)	Delivered/​completed (ha)	Expec­ted deliv­ery for the year (ha)
Oct-22		600	945	600	950
Nov-22		750	1225	650	950
Dec-22		850	1285	787	950
Jan-23	905	862	1217	870	1050
Feb-23		998	1217	899 (mid-feb)	1150
Mar-23		1124	1217		1198

Spend

CAP­IT­AL	Total annu­al budget (m)	Actu­al spent (m)	Com­mit­ted (m)	Uncom­mit­ted (m)	Fore­cast spend (m)
Oct-22	2.96	0.12	1.86	1.11	0.50
Nov-22		0.155	1.89	1.07	0.80
Dec-22		0.231	1.89	0.37	1.30
Jan-23	2.26	0.98	1.89	0.37	1.15
Feb-23		1.125	1.89	0.37	1.60
Mar-23					1.89

RESOURCE	Total annu­al budget (m)	Actu­al spent (m)	Com­mit­ted (m)	Uncom­mit­ted (m)	Fore­cast spend (m)
Oct-22		0.207	0.4	0.105	0.505
Nov-22		0.252	0.4	0.105	0.505
Dec-22		0.281	0.4	0.105	0.505
Jan-23	0.505	0.31	0.415	0.09	0.505
Feb-23		0.34	0.415	0.09	0.415
Mar-23

Future fore­cast:

Fore­cast	2023 – 24	2024 – 25	2025 – 26	2026 – 27	2027 – 28
Hec­tares	1319	1515	1575	1730	1725
Resource (£m)	0.510	0.567	0.635	0.703	0.778
Cap­it­al (£m)	3.636	3.953	4.440	4.889	4.647
Total budget (£m)	4.146	4.519	5.075	5.592	5.426

Colin McCle­an 28/02/2023 colinmacclean@​cairngorms.​co.​uk