230609PerfCtteePaper4CLLD

For Dis­cus­sion

Title: Cairngorms Lead­er and Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment Funding

Pre­pared by: Dav­id Camer­on, Deputy Chief Exec­ut­ive and Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Services

Pur­pose

This paper presents the latest deliv­ery updates on the Cairngorms LEAD­ER Pro­gramme and vol­un­tary and char­it­able giv­ing activ­it­ies as man­aged by the Cairngorms LEAD­ER Loc­al Action Group Trust (Cairngorms Trust). This update focuses on the ongo­ing work to seek replace­ment LEAD­ER fund­ing to sup­port Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment (CLLD).

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	Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
Fin­ance: Deliv­er Cairngorms LEAD­ER Pro­gramme, max­im­ising use of resources made available	Blue (Com­plete)	Pro­gramme con­cluded 31 Decem­ber 2021, with final pro­ject LEAD­ER spend at 95% of alloc­a­tion and total pro­ject expendit­ure at 168% of alloc­a­tion after account­ing for match fund­ing levered into projects.
Audit: clean clos­ure of LEAD­ER Pro­gramme includ­ing mon­it­or­ing and eval­u­ation of per­form­ance indicators	Blue (Com­plete)	All pro­ject records final­ised. No mat­ters arising with respect to LEAD­ER clos­ure over last 8 months. Sug­gest this can now be closed as an ele­ment of per­form­ance monitoring.
Policy: secure future Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment (CLLD) of equi­val­ent value to LEAD­ER Pro­gramme allocation	Amber	Final alloc­a­tion of £320,000 secured from nation­al alloc­a­tion of £7 mil­lion for 2022⁄23. Ini­tial alloc­a­tion of £225,000 for 2023⁄24. No long term or multi-year com­mit­ment in place, and fund­ing alloc­a­tions to CLLD areas remain­ing well below pre­vi­ous LEAD­ER Pro­gramme values.
Policy: Devel­op and imple­ment vol­un­tary giv­ing mech­an­isms through Cairngorms Trust	Amber	This remains a chal­len­ging area of work. Cairngorms Trust is seek­ing to rein­vig­or­ate the stake­hold­er group advising on the devel­op­ment of vol­un­tary giv­ing approaches while con­tinu­ing to tri­al and test approaches.
Fin­ance: increase vol­un­tary giv­ing returns with­in Trust’s future fund­ing pro­file to a level which sus­tain costs of infra­struc­ture and return mean­ing­ful sur­pluses for investment.	Red	Cur­rent level of returns over peri­od of COV­ID restric­tions well below tar­geted levels.
Policy: oper­a­tion of char­it­able mech­an­ism an effect­ive ele­ment of NPPP pri­or­ity delivery	Green	The capa­city to work in part­ner­ship with an inde­pend­ent char­ity cov­er­ing the Cairngorms has been a cru­cial ele­ment in suc­cess­ful deliv­ery of Green Recov­ery Fund­ing; in secur­ing resource for CLLD made avail­able over the last three years; and in com­munity engage­ment in deliv­er­ing loc­al pri­or­it­ies. The use of the char­ity mech­an­ism to estab­lish the Cairngorms Youth Loc­al Action Group as a del­eg­ated grant award­ing body has received nation­al prom­in­ence and now fea­tures as an exem­plar approach in Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment CLLD guid­ance for 23⁄24.

Stra­tegic Background

1. The Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan (NPPP) for 2022 to 2027 includes the fol­low­ing objective:

a. B7 Com­munity-led Plan­ning and Devel­op­ment: Com­munit­ies have up to-date com­munity action plans and are sup­por­ted by a com­munity-led loc­al devel­op­ment fund­ing pro­gramme, deliv­er­ing the Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan.

This object­ive has an asso­ci­ated action of: devel­op and admin­is­ter a new com­munity-led devel­op­ment fund­ing stream, which is being taken for­ward through the work covered by this paper.

1. The Park Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan agreed by the board in March 2023 includes the fol­low­ing rel­ev­ant stra­tegic object­ives asso­ci­ated with this aspect of the NPPP:

a. Dir­ect activ­ity by the Park Author­ity: act as account­able body or oth­er sup­port­ing role as required to under­pin deliv­ery of CLLD in Cairngorms.

b. Indir­ect activ­ity sup­por­ted or resourced by the Park Author­ity: influ­ence stra­tegic devel­op­ment of nation­al focus on and design of CLLD to secure an adequate level of resourcing which con­tin­ues to focus on Cairngorms NP as an admin­is­trat­ive boundary.

1. Stra­tegic risks of rel­ev­ance to con­sid­er­a­tion of per­form­ance of the pro­grammes of work con­sidered by this paper are:

a. A1: Resource risk remedi­al mit­ig­a­tion: Con­tinu­ing to sup­port ​“deliv­ery bod­ies” such as Cairngorms Nature, Cairngorms Trust in secur­ing inward investment.

b. A11.1 Stra­tegic Risk on Resourcing: Role as Lead / Account­able body for major pro­grammes (e.g. LEAD­ER, Land­scape Part­ner­ship) has risk of sig­ni­fic­ant fin­an­cial claw­back should expendit­ure prove to be not eli­gible for fund­ing, while CNPA car­ries respons­ib­il­it­ies as employ­er for pro­gramme staff.

c. A11.2 Stra­tegic Risk Resourcing: the end of major pro­gramme invest­ments (Tomin­toul and Glen­liv­et, LEAD­ER) requires sig­ni­fic­ant ongo­ing staff­ing to man­age audit and leg­acy which the Author­ity finds dif­fi­cult to resource.

d. A12.2 Stra­tegic Risk on Resourcing: future com­munity led loc­al devel­op­ment fund­ing cur­rently delivered through LEAD­ER, togeth­er with wider fund­ing pre­vi­ously from EU struc­tur­al and agri­cul­tur­al sources is lost

e. and cre­ates a sig­ni­fic­ant gap in our capa­city to deliv­er against our devel­op­ment pri­or­it­ies. A28 Stra­tegic Risk on Staff­ing: deliv­ery of key out­comes is impacted by staff turnover, par­tic­u­larly in pro­ject teams.

Per­form­ance Over­view: Deliv­ery Against Stra­tegic Expectations

1. What While the Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment has approved a budget for CLLD in excess of £11m for the cur­rent year, only around £6.7m of that total has been released to date while Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment offi­cials assess the level of fin­an­cial pres­sures across the breadth of the Scot­tish budget. This pos­i­tion, com­bined with a large rur­al area rejoin­ing the CLLD rur­al fund­ing land­scape with a newly formed Loc­al Action Group and tak­ing an alloc­a­tion from avail­able ²⁰²³⁄₂₄ funds, has res­ul­ted in an ini­tial alloc­a­tion of CLLD fund­ing for Cairngorms which is lower for the cur­rent year than the ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ alloc­a­tion. The Cairngorms Trust and its sup­port team were suc­cess­ful in secur­ing addi­tion­al alloc­a­tions through the course of the pre­vi­ous year and we hope to be able to again secure fur­ther fund­ing as the year progresses.

2. The alloc­a­tions over this and last year, at £0.545m over a two year peri­od still falls well short of aver­age annu­al fund­ing levels required to achieve the object­ive as secur­ing CLLD fund­ing levels equat­ing to the pre­vi­ous LEAD­ER Pro­gramme levels of between £2m and £3m over a 5 to 6 year peri­od. The fund­ing also con­tin­ues to oper­ate over a single fin­an­cial year rather than a long-term pro­gramme, which con­strains plan­ning time and capa­city for applic­ants to devel­op and refine pro­ject ideas. Nev­er­the­less, the fund­ing increase does sup­port an increased scale in CLLD activ­ity. This work has also allowed the Cairngorms 2030 Her­it­age Hori­zons Pro­gramme approach to com­munity grant schemes to be developed and tested through ​“live”, fun­ded approaches rather than solely through policy development.

3. The Trust con­tin­ues to receive small value vol­un­tary dona­tions each quarter. Fund­ing has been made avail­able to the Trust to rein­vig­or­ate the vol­un­tary giv­ing scheme over the course of ²⁰²²⁄₂₃ and ²⁰²³⁄₂₄ with an object­ive of estab­lish­ing wheth­er there is poten­tial for such an ini­ti­at­ive to gen­er­ate a level of return in the medi­um to long term which would become self-sus­tain­ing and provide mean­ing­ful levels of invest­ment in the Trust’s char­it­able object­ives. The Trust is

4. seek­ing to rein­vig­or­ate an advis­ory group of stake­hold­ers estab­lished to advise on this area of its work. The col­lect­ive work of the Cairngorms Trust and Park Author­ity in this area of activ­ity is to an extent lead­ing the way for devel­op­ment of approaches to CLLD in Scot­land. Our decision to incor­por­ate the Loc­al Action Group (LAG) some years ago as a Scot­tish Incor­por­ated Char­it­able Organ­isa­tion (SCIO) is now a high­lighted aspect of good gov­ernance with­in the Scot­tish Government’s policy doc­u­ment­a­tion. Sim­il­arly, our decision to estab­lish the Youth LAG, and to do so with­in the Trust’s char­it­able struc­ture, is also now reflec­ted as an exem­plar approach by Scot­tish Government’s CLLD guidance.

Con­clu­sions: Per­form­ance Over­view and Mat­ters Mer­it­ing Stra­tegic Review

1. There are no mat­ters of stra­tegic sig­ni­fic­ance which mer­it escal­a­tion at this time in the opin­ion of seni­or man­agers lead­ing the Cairngorms NPA’s link­age to the areas of activ­ity covered by this paper and asso­ci­ated reports.

Dav­id Camer­on 19 May 2023 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk