240920Paper3CairngormsTrustCCLD

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 3 20 Septem­ber 2024

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For Dis­cus­sion Title: Cairngorms Trust and Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment Update Pre­pared by: Dav­id Camer­on, Deputy Chief Exec­ut­ive and Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Services

Pur­pose

1. This paper presents an update on the work of the Cairngorms Loc­al Action Group Trust (‘the Cairngorms Trust’) and the col­lect­ive work of the Cairngorms Trust and the Park Author­ity in Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment (CLLD) activity.

Recom­mend­a­tions

1. The Com­mit­tee is asked to con­sider: a) Wheth­er the pro­grammes of activ­ity are mak­ing the expec­ted con­tri­bu­tion to the Park Authority’s agreed stra­tegic out­comes. b) Wheth­er the deliv­ery updates sug­gest any stra­tegic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant impacts on the Park Authority’s agreed per­form­ance object­ives. c) Wheth­er any mater­i­al impacts on the Park Authority’s stra­tegic risk man­age­ment and mit­ig­a­tion meas­ures arise from assess­ment of pro­gramme delivery.

Per­form­ance Dashboard

1. Assess­ment of the deliv­ery of work being taken for­ward by the Cairngorms Trust and in devel­op­ment of CLLD with­in the Cairngorms Nation­al Park against key per­form­ance meas­ures is presen­ted in the fol­low­ing table. The over­all assess­ment and risk rat­ing against these meas­ures is presen­ted as com­pared to the pre­vi­ous rat­ing last repor­ted to the Com­mit­tee in June 2023.

Per­form­ance Meas­ure	Pri­or Rat­ing	Cur­rent Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
Fin­ance: Deliv­er Cairngorms LEAD­ER Pro­gramme, max­im­ising use of resources made available	Blue (com­plete)	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.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 3 20 Septem­ber 2024

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Per­form­ance Meas­ure	Pri­or Rat­ing	Cur­rent Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
Audit: clean clos­ure of LEAD­ER Pro­gramme includ­ing mon­it­or­ing and eval­u­ation of per­form­ance indicators	Blue (com­plete)	Blue (com­plete)	All pro­ject records final­ised. No mat­ters arising with respect to LEAD­ER clos­ure over last eight 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	Green	Red	While no long term or multi-year com­mit­ment is in place, fund­ing alloc­a­tions to CLLD of £320,000 and £403,000 over pri­or two years approached pre­vi­ous LEAD­ER Pro­gramme val­ues at an annu­al equi­val­ent level. How­ever, fund­ing for 2024⁄25 to date has been lim­ited to £250,000 with a second phase of fund­ing paused pending cur­rent Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment budget review processes
Policy: Devel­op and imple­ment vol­un­tary giv­ing mech­an­isms through Cairngorms Trust	Amber	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	Red	Cur­rent level of returns over peri­od of Cov­id-19 restric­tions and imme­di­ate after­math of that remains below tar­geted levels. The Cairngorms Trust’s revised busi­ness plan agreed by the Trust board in August 2024 tar­gets increas­ing vol­un­tary giv­ing returns to £30,000 by 2026⁄27. A vol­un­tary giv­ing part­ner­ship group has been reformed to help drive this, includ­ing Park Author­ity, Trust, com­munity and Cairngorms Busi­ness Part­ner­ship (CBP) representatives.
Policy: oper­a­tion of char­it­able mech­an­ism an effect­ive ele­ment of Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan (NPPP) pri­or­ity delivery	Green	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 2023⁄24.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 3 20 Septem­ber 2024

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Stra­tegic context

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 NPPP.

2. 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.

3. 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 Nation­al Park as an admin­is­trat­ive boundary.

Stra­tegic risk management

1. Stra­tegic risks of rel­ev­ance to con­sid­er­a­tion of per­form­ance of the pro­grammes of work con­sidered by this paper are: a) Pub­lic sec­tor fin­ances con­strain capa­city to alloc­ate suf­fi­cient resources to deliv­er the cor­por­ate plan. A mit­ig­a­tion of this risk is to con­tin­ue to sup­port bod­ies such as the Cairngorms Trust to secure inward invest­ment. b) Risk of Cairngorms 2030 match fund­ing not being secured. Anti­cip­ated Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment (CLLD) fund­ing to be secured by the Cairngorms Trust totalling £1.25 mil­lion is incor­por­ated as match funding.

2. These stra­tegic risks are escal­at­ing at this time, giv­en the recent fund­ing restric­tions noti­fied by Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment (SG).

3. Bey­ond high­light­ing escal­a­tion of exist­ing recog­nised risks, there are no mat­ters of stra­tegic sig­ni­fic­ance which are assessed to mer­it escal­a­tion at this time in the opin­ion of seni­or man­agers lead­ing the Park Authority’s link­age to the areas of activ­ity covered by this paper and asso­ci­ated reports.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 3 20 Septem­ber 2024

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Sup­port­ing information

1. The Cairngorms Trust, work­ing with the Park Author­ity as its Account­able Body, has suc­cess­fully secured addi­tion­al fund­ing of over £400,000 in sup­port of CLLD activ­it­ies for ²⁰²³⁄₂₄. This builds on a total of £320,000 in the pri­or year. Annu­al CLLD resources have reached levels of fund­ing which approach the equi­val­ent annu­al val­ues avail­able in pre­vi­ous multi-year LEAD­ER pro­grammes of between £2 mil­lion and £3 mil­lion over a five-to-six-year period.

2. How­ever, there is some sig­ni­fic­ant risk of these pri­or year levels not being achieved for ²⁰²⁴⁄₂₅. The Cairngorms Trust is wait­ing on the out­come of a bid for £58,000 in sup­port of the Youth Loc­al Action Group’s work and on a poten­tial alloc­a­tion from a second tranche of fund­ing to sup­port CLLD grant awards to com­munity groups. Cur­rent fund­ing totalling around £250,000 includ­ing cov­er for staff salar­ies has been received and avail­able funds fully com­mit­ted to sup­port com­munity led and gen­er­ated pro­jects. The cur­rent year fund­ing level does at least remain in line with expec­ted match fund­ing levels for Cairngorms 2030 activities.

3. The lack of con­firmed multi-year fund­ing remains a key lim­it­a­tion in our sup­port of CLLD activ­it­ies. Com­munity groups are not able to plan and devel­op their pro­ject pro­pos­als over the long term without facing the risks of fin­ances not being avail­able in future years. This acts to pre­vent sup­port to sig­ni­fic­ant ​‘step-change’ pro­jects in loc­al communities.

4. The most recent update presen­ted by the Trust Man­ager to the Trust’s board meet­ing of August 2024 is presen­ted at Annex 1 to this report. This report gives a fla­vour of the recent activ­it­ies of the Cairngorms Trust to Com­mit­tee members.

5. The Trust con­tin­ues to receive small value vol­un­tary dona­tions each quarter. The Trust has rein­vig­or­ated an advis­ory group of stake­hold­ers estab­lished to advise on its work in devel­op­ment of vol­un­tary giv­ing schemes. This has proven to be a very dif­fi­cult area to devel­op and impacted sig­ni­fic­antly by the Cov­id-19 pan­dem­ic and the wider focus on recov­ery from that by com­munit­ies and busi­nesses in recent years. The Trust’s busi­ness plan to 2027 tar­gets an increase in dona­tions to £30,000 each year by the end of the busi­ness plan period.

6. 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.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 3 20 Septem­ber 2024

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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.

Dav­id Camer­on, Deputy CEO and Dir­ect­or of Cor­por­ate Services