CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

Form­al Board Paper 3 25^th March 2022

CAIRNGORMS NATION­AL PARK AUTHORITY

FOR DIS­CUS­SION

Title: STRA­TEGIC RISK MAN­AGE­MENT AND MON­IT­OR­ING COR­POR­ATE PERFORMANCE

Pre­pared by: VICKY WALK­ER, GOV­ERNANCE & REPORT­ING MANAGER

Pur­pose

This paper presents an update on the Authority’s per­form­ance to date in work­ing towards deliv­ery of stra­tegic object­ives estab­lished in the 2018 to 2022 Cor­por­ate Plan.

The paper focuses on deliv­ery against the Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors adop­ted as meas­ures of per­form­ance in deliv­ery of our Cor­por­ate Plan, while high­light­ing by excep­tion any sig­ni­fic­ant con­straints, risks or short­com­ings on planned delivery.

The paper also presents the latest ver­sion of the Stra­tegic Risk Register, fol­low­ing ongo­ing review and mit­ig­a­tion action by the Man­age­ment Team and review by the Audit and Risk Committee.

Inform­a­tion is presen­ted on deliv­ery against the Cor­por­ate Plan only in this paper. Updates on deliv­ery of the Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan for 2017 to 2022 are repor­ted separately.

Recom­mend­a­tions

The Board is asked to:

a) Review the update on cor­por­ate per­form­ance and stra­tegic risk man­age­ment set out in this paper.

b) High­light any achieve­ments or excep­tions which, from a stra­tegic lead­er­ship per­spect­ive, Board mem­bers believe are of par­tic­u­lar sig­ni­fic­ance to the deliv­ery of the Authority’s stra­tegic objectives.

c) Review and com­ment on the risk register for com­plete­ness in cov­er­age of cur­rent stra­tegic risks and adequacy of mit­ig­a­tion actions.

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Form­al Board Paper 3 25^th March 2022

STRA­TEGIC RISK MAN­AGE­MENT AND MON­IT­OR­ING COR­POR­ATE PER­FORM­ANCE – FOR DISCUSSION

Stra­tegic Context

1. The Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan, http://​cairngorms​.co​.uk/​w​p​-​c​o​n​t​e​n​t​/​u​p​l​o​a​d​s​/​2​0​1​8​/​0​7​/​C​N​P​A​C​o​r​p​o​r​a​t​e​P​l​a​n​2​0​1​8​-​2​0​2​2.pdf describes how we will con­trib­ute to the deliv­ery of the Cairngorms Nation­al Park Part­ner­ship Plan (NPPP).

2. The Cor­por­ate Plan also sets out how the CNPA will sup­port the Government’s cent­ral pur­pose: to focus the Gov­ern­ment and pub­lic ser­vices on cre­at­ing a more suc­cess­ful coun­try, with oppor­tun­it­ies for all of Scot­land to flour­ish, through increased well­being and sus­tain­able and inclus­ive eco­nom­ic growth and deliv­ery of the Pro­gramme for Gov­ern­ment. To this end, the plan high­lights (page X) that the work of the Author­ity makes a con­tri­bu­tion to 6 of the Scot­tish Government’s || Nation­al Out­comes agreed with­in the Nation­al Per­form­ance Framework.

3. A cor­por­ate per­form­ance frame­work is required to meas­ure the extent to which we suc­ceed in deliv­er­ing the pri­or­it­ies agreed in the cor­por­ate plan and make the desired con­tri­bu­tions to wider nation­al gov­ern­ment strategies. The Board agreed the Authority’s cor­por­ate per­form­ance frame­work as an integ­ral part of the Cor­por­ate Plan. The inform­a­tion presen­ted with this paper fol­lows those agreed Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors (KPIs).

4. This Cor­por­ate Plan deliv­ery update is the final update for the span of the Cor­por­ate plan. Since 2020 there have been some ongo­ing impacts on deliv­ery due to restric­tions and impacts of the COVID19 pan­dem­ic. This update fea­tures a range of com­ment­ar­ies where some of these the impacts have impacted on the final pos­i­tion for deliv­ery of the Cor­por­ate plan. Man­age­ment Team have closely mon­itored the cap­ab­il­ity to con­tin­ue to deliv­er planned actions toward achieve­ment of the Authority’s agreed stra­tegic object­ives and adverse impacts have been mit­ig­ated accord­ingly. The Annexes presen­ted along with this paper, and in par­tic­u­lar Annex 2 which sets out the Key Per­form­ance Indic­at­ors, and our anti­cip­ated deliv­ery pos­i­tion at the end of the Cor­por­ate plan peri­od. A num­ber of indic­at­ors have increased from Amber to Green since the last report­ing period.

Stra­tegic Policy Considerations

1. The Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan makes ref­er­ence to our con­tri­bu­tion to Nation­al Out­comes. In most cases the cor­por­ate per­form­ance indic­at­ors do not present a dir­ect meas­ure of con­tri­bu­tion to the spe­cif­ic out­comes. Rather, they are agreed to

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rep­res­ent an appro­pri­ate ​“proxy” indic­at­or, whereby our demon­stra­tion of achieve­ment in a spe­cif­ic area of the Authority’s oper­a­tions is accep­ted as a reas­on­able meas­ure of our con­tri­bu­tion to wider nation­al or port­fo­lio objectives.

Stra­tegic Risk Management

1. The Board con­sidered and approved the cur­rent stra­tegic risk register sup­port­ing deliv­ery of the 2018 to 2022 Cor­por­ate Plan at its meet­ing in June 2018. The Board also endorsed the Authority’s Stra­tegic Risk Man­age­ment Strategy at the same meeting.

2. The stra­tegic risk register has evolved con­sid­er­ably since that time. The register is reg­u­larly reviewed and updated by both the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee and the Man­age­ment Team with the Board con­sid­er­ing the pos­i­tion on stra­tegic risk man­age­ment at the same time as it con­siders these Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance reports. The Stra­tegic Risk Register is a dynam­ic doc­u­ment. Risks will be removed when their like­li­hood of occur­rence and / or their poten­tial impact is assessed to have declined suf­fi­ciently through man­age­ment and imple­ment­a­tion of mit­ig­a­tion or cir­cum­stances change in the Authority’s wider oper­at­ing envir­on­ment. The cur­rent ver­sion of the stra­tegic risk register is set out for con­sid­er­a­tion as an Annex to this paper.

3. Respond­ing to feed­back from intern­al audit, the risk register now ana­lyses the pro­posed risk mit­ig­a­tion actions between ​“pre­vent­at­ive” and ​“remedi­al” action: respect­ively estab­lish­ing man­age­ment activ­it­ies designed to pre­vent the risk from tak­ing hap­pen­ing and seek­ing to min­im­ise the impact of a risk should it occur. This cat­egor­isa­tion is inten­ded to assist the Board and Man­age­ment Team bet­ter assess the adequacy of actions pro­posed to man­age risk.

4. The Board are invited at this point to review the cur­rent ver­sion of the Stra­tegic Risk Register; identi­fy any poten­tial stra­tegic risks not cur­rently included; com­ment on the draft assess­ment of sig­ni­fic­ance of risks iden­ti­fied and adequacy of pro­posed mitigation.

Implic­a­tions

1. Both the Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance Mon­it­or­ing Frame­work and Stra­tegic Risk Register have been developed with a view to man­aging and lim­it­ing the staff time resource required to sup­port the admin­is­tra­tion of these pro­cesses, while ensur­ing that the pro­cesses them­selves are fit for pur­pose in man­aging risk to which the Author­ity is exposed and meas­ur­ing our suc­cess in achiev­ing agreed cor­por­ate pri­or­it­ies. We are aim­ing to make best use of data already col­lec­ted by ourselves and our part­ners and hence tap into exist­ing work rather than cre­ate new, often costly, data col­lec­tion pro­cesses. Some indic­at­ors have data col­lec­ted annu­ally or over longer periods.

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There­fore not all indic­at­ors will change over the peri­od since these mon­it­or­ing reports were last presen­ted to the Board.

1. Our stra­tegic risk man­age­ment pro­cess and prac­tices build on exist­ing meth­ods already reviewed and approved by Audit & Risk Com­mit­tee and eval­u­ated by intern­al and extern­al audit. Our stra­tegic plan­ning and cor­por­ate per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing report­ing was also sub­ject to intern­al audit review as part of the ²⁰¹⁸⁄₁₉ intern­al audit pro­gramme and received a ​“clear” intern­al audit report. The intern­al aud­it­ors, BDO, gave a ​“sub­stan­tial” (highest) rat­ing to both the design and oper­a­tion­al effect­ive­ness of these per­form­ance mon­it­or­ing processes.

2. Our risk man­age­ment pro­cesses require staff to ref­er­ence the agreed stra­tegic risks in devel­op­ing spe­cif­ic strategies and policies and tail­or their plans accord­ingly, to both ensure these policies and strategies are not impacted by the recog­nised risks and also help man­age these risks.

3. In tak­ing for­ward actions and pro­jects to help deliv­er Cor­por­ate Plan pri­or­it­ies, Dir­ect­ors and their Heads of Ser­vice are expec­ted to ensure that oper­a­tion­al plans and / or pro­ject plans where required are covered by more spe­cif­ic risk registers and risk man­age­ment practices.

Suc­cess Measures

1. Imple­ment­a­tion of an effect­ive Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance Mon­it­or­ing Sys­tem is an essen­tial com­pon­ent of enabling iden­ti­fic­a­tion of suc­cess in deliv­ery of the Board’s agreed Cor­por­ate Plan.

2. Effect­ive risk man­age­ment pro­cesses ensure that risks that may impact on suc­cess are iden­ti­fied, man­aged and / or mon­itored appro­pri­ately to sup­port deliv­ery of Cor­por­ate object­ives. Risk man­age­ment pro­cesses also assist in eval­u­at­ing oppor­tun­it­ies for action and in determ­in­ing the Authority’s approaches to most effect­ively real­ising those opportunities.

3. The work in bring­ing these pro­cesses togeth­er there­fore forms a key aspect of the Authority’s stra­tegic man­age­ment processes.

4. The pro­gress shown in the Cor­por­ate Per­form­ance qual­it­at­ive and quant­it­at­ive updates are them­selves present­ing the suc­cess meas­ures in the Authority’s deliv­er of its approved cor­por­ate objectives.

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Sup­port­ing Information:

Update on Cor­por­ate Plan Monitoring

1. A sum­mary of the Authority’s Cor­por­ate Plan mon­it­or­ing inform­a­tion is presen­ted in Annex I. Cor­por­ate KPIs com­ple­ment­ing the qual­it­at­ive updates on per­form­ance are set out in Annex 2 presen­ted with this paper. A com­ment­ary on the cur­rent status of these KPIs is also presen­ted. More inform­a­tion on the high­lights and issues arising over the course of Cor­por­ate Plan deliv­ery to date is presen­ted in the fol­low­ing sec­tions of this paper.

Con­ser­va­tion and Land Man­age­ment — Highlights

1. The Caper­cail­lie pro­ject has con­tin­ued to meet all pro­ject mile­stones and is invest­ig­at­ing new approaches to con­ser­va­tion of spe­cies across a num­ber of part­ners with seni­or level engage­ment. The suc­cess­ful award of a fur­ther £2.9 mil­lion in fund­ing in June 2021 has ensured deliv­ery of find­ings from the devel­op­ment phase of the pro­ject up until July 2023. Pro­ject funds are alloc­ated to loc­al com­munit­ies via devolved alloc­a­tions of up to £100,000 per com­munity, through com­mis­sion­ing innov­ate genet­ics and social sci­ence research, land man­age­ment con­tracts and dir­ectly employ­ing game­keep­ers, eco­lo­gists and pro­ject staff — all deliv­er­ing caper­cail­lie con­ser­va­tion across the Nation­al Park from July 2020 until July 2023.

2. Since the last update, 1553.5 ha of wood­land cre­ation has been approved by Scot­tish Forestry in the Nation­al Park. This is spread across the High­land, Aber­deen­shire and Perth & Kinross loc­al author­ity areas. The bulk of the hec­tar­age is accoun­ted for by an approved nat­ur­al regen­er­a­tion scheme of 1425 ha, which will be delivered by Wild­land Ltd. A pro­posed nat­ive wood­land plant­ing scheme of 426 ha at Kin­rara is cur­rently out for con­sulta­tion by Scot­tish Forestry. Fur­ther wood­land expan­sion con­tin­ues to pro­gress in key areas through man­aging deer pop­u­la­tions for nat­ur­al regeneration

3. Spe­cies con­ser­va­tion con­tin­ues to be driv­en for­wards primar­ily through the work of ded­ic­ated pro­jects, namely Rare Inver­teb­rates in the Cairngorms, Cairngorms Rare Plants & Wild Con­nec­tions, Wet­lands and Waders Ini­ti­at­ives, Cairngorms Wild­cat and Cairngorms Caper­cail­lie pro­jects. CNPA and BTO have pro­duced sens­it­iv­ity maps identi­fy­ing key cur­lew hab­it­at and breed­ing sites across the Park and CNPA is devel­op­ing Park-wide Fresh Water Pearl Mus­sel spe­cies rein­force­ment strategy and a rap­tor con­ser­va­tion strategy.

4. Cairngorms Nature BIG Week­end, is set to wel­come back people to the land­scapes, wild­life and land man­age­ment in the Park in May 2022. Approx­im­ately 100 events run by land man­agers, organ­isa­tions, com­munit­ies and enthu­si­asts across the Park will be

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avail­able for people to find out more about the Nation­al Park, how it’s man­aged and the wild­life it’s fam­ous for.

Con­ser­va­tion and Land Man­age­ment – Excep­tion Reporting

1. Wild­life crime con­tin­ues to be high­lighted as an excep­tion in this round of per­form­ance report­ing, as incid­ents con­tin­ue to occur in the Park. The rap­tor track­ers acquired with fund­ing from NatureScot are con­tinu­ing to be fit­ted to golden eagles in the park. Work with Police Scot­land and oth­er part­ners to try to reduce incid­ents is ongo­ing. Broad­er rap­tor work in the Park is being dis­cussed, includ­ing improved mon­it­or­ing, con­ser­va­tion pro­jects and ways of shift­ing the ​‘rap­tor cul­ture’ in parts of the Park.

2. Peat­land res­tor­a­tion work, pre­vi­ously flagged as at escal­ated ​“red” risk of deliv­ery, has improved per­form­ance is now at amber risk of deliv­ery. The Peat­land Team are on tar­get to meet exceed per­form­ance tar­gets from Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment which sup­port fund­ing received but will fail to meet the tar­get out­lined in the Cor­por­ate Plan which is nearly double the tar­get agreed with Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment. Deliv­ery had been sig­ni­fic­antly impa­cated by COVID19 restric­tions dur­ing ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ but has sig­ni­fic­antly increased activ­ity dur­ing ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ and anti­cip­ate between 550 and 700 hec­tares will be com­pleted dur­ing this fin­an­cial year.

3. The Caper­cail­lie num­ber tar­get unlikely to be met and is now flagged as a red rated risk. Full nation­al sur­vey res­ults are due in 2022 but oth­er sur­veys sug­gest pop­u­la­tion has declined ser­i­ously from the 1100 birds estim­ated 2016.

Vis­it­or Exper­i­ence — Highlights

1. 51.8 km of path upgraded by Moun­tains & People pro­ject (ended Jan 2021) and 6.5 km of new path con­struc­ted along Spey­side Way Exten­sion & Sev­en Bridges path Bal­later. Fur­ther improve­ments to the route at Grant­own, Kin­craig & Tromie being developed in 2021. Both path cre­ation and path upgrade KPIs sought over the Cor­por­ate Plan peri­od are now achieved.

2. Full vis­it­or sur­vey data indic­ates 27% of vis­it­ors from C2, D & E cat­egor­ies which sig­ni­fic­antly exceeds the tar­get of 20% of vis­it­ors from these categories.

3. The ranger ser­vice was fully oper­a­tion­al from April 2021 and will con­tin­ue with increased num­bers of sea­son­al rangers from April 2022. The new ser­vice was pos­it­ively received by com­munit­ies and part­ners as vis­it­or num­bers to the park increased sig­ni­fic­antly dur­ing the Sum­mer of 2021.

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1. The tar­get level of volun­teer rangers trained over the cor­por­ate plan peri­od has also been achieved, an addi­tion­al 9 volun­teer rangers have been recruited since the last update.

Vis­it­or Exper­i­ence – Excep­tion Reporting

1. The cur­rent inter­rup­tion to ser­vice at Cairngorm Moun­tain remains a key issue for the Cairngorms vis­it­or infra­struc­ture and tour­ism eco­nomy. We con­tin­ue to work as closely as pos­sible with High­lands and Island Enter­prise (HIE) and oth­er stake­hold­ers on this mat­ter, and review­ing the wider impacts of this on the Cairngorm and Glen­more Strategy, while recog­nising that HIE are very much in the lead in plan­ning for the future of Cairngorm Mountain.

2. Cur­rent STEAM data also con­tin­ues to indic­ate that the tour­ism impact in the south­ern and east­ern areas of the Cairngorms Nation­al Park is declin­ing very slightly from pri­or year levels rather than increas­ing toward the tar­get of 25% of the total vis­it­or eco­nomy. The pos­i­tion remains an increase from the baseline fig­ure, although trend is down­ward rather than the tar­geted increase.

3. John Muir Award com­ple­tions has been sig­ni­fic­antly impacted by Cov­id-19 restric­tions with 832 awards being com­pleted dur­ing 2021 sig­ni­fic­antly lower than over 2000 com­pleted dur­ing 2019.

Rur­al Devel­op­ment – Highlights

1. The CNPA has gran­ted con­sent (includ­ing con­sent by appeal) for 578 afford­able homes since 31^st March 2018

Rur­al Devel­op­ment – Excep­tion Reporting

1. There are no excep­tions to report on Com­mu­nic­a­tions at this point

Com­mu­nic­a­tions — Highlights

1. In 2021, we reached 351,820 web­site ses­sions, a 7% increase on the 2020 fig­ure but short of our 400k tar­get. Social media engage­ment increased by 50% from 2020. This growth can be attrib­uted to focus­ing on build­ing our Ins­tagram and Linked­In audi­ences, includ­ing reach­ing our end of year goal of 10,000 fol­low­ers on Instagram.

2. The inform­al phase of the NPPP4 con­sulta­tion was launched in Septem­ber with form­al responses being a focus in Novem­ber and Decem­ber. A sig­ni­fic­ant increase in responses was received as a result.

3. A num­ber of staff were present for a vari­ety of events at COP26 which took place in Glas­gow from 31 Octo­ber to 12 Novem­ber. Park staff engaged with hun­dreds of

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del­eg­ates as part of an Envir­on­ment and Eco­nom­ies Lead­ers’ Group and CNPA’s Chief Exec­ut­ive delivered a speech on the impacts of cli­mate change on snow levels in the Park at the Cryo­sphere Pavil­ion, and also took part in a pan­el event with oth­er UK Nation­al Parks.

Com­mu­nic­a­tions – Excep­tion Reporting

1. There are no excep­tions to report on Com­mu­nic­a­tions at this point.

Cor­por­ate Ser­vices — Organ­isa­tion­al Development

1. Cairngorms NPA was recog­nised this year as one of the Top 10 Flex­ible Organ­isa­tions in Scot­land, giv­ing sig­ni­fic­ant pub­lic and sec­tor­al recog­ni­tion to the work being under­taken through our Organ­isa­tion­al Devel­op­ment Strategy in build­ing an effect­ive organ­isa­tion while estab­lish­ing a pos­it­ive work / life bal­ance for our staff.

Organ­isa­tion­al Devel­op­ment – Excep­tion Report

1. Since the last update 3 posts have not had a suc­cess­ful recruit­ment at the first attempt. Two of these were suc­cess­fully recruited to fol­low­ing a re-spe­cific­a­tion of the role dur­ing a second recruit­ment. The fur­ther post is cur­rently out to second recruitment.

Oth­er Cor­por­ate KPIs and Cross-cut­ting Indicators

1. Des­pite the range of COV­ID impacts and unusu­al scale of budget amend­ments approved, draft year-end fig­ures for ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ fin­an­cial year indic­ate that fin­ances over the year have been suc­cess­fully man­aged with a small under-spend equat­ing to 0.6% of the total income of £7.035 mil­lion under man­age­ment in the year.

2. Fin­an­cial resources avail­able to the Author­ity for ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ are sig­ni­fic­antly ahead of the Cor­por­ate Plan projections.

3. Our car­bon emis­sions mod­el­ling high­lights a sig­ni­fic­ant reduc­tion in emis­sions over the course of the last year. Of course, the sus­pen­sion of the great major­ity of busi­ness related travel over the course of the year must be borne in mind at this point. Annu­al pro­gress pri­or to ²⁰²⁰⁄₂₁ on redu­cing our busi­ness related emis­sions has been pos­it­ive and we con­tin­ue to focus on the car­bon impacts of our oper­a­tions as we begin to devel­op the plans around mov­ing out of our busi­ness con­tinu­ity plan­ning phase into our ​“new nor­mal” oper­a­tion­al mode.

4. FOISA requests have reduced to amber for this report­ing peri­od as staff absence before the Christ­mas break lead to delays one respond­ing to two requests. Overall

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the response rate with­in stat­utory time scales is 92% des­pite an increase in requests dur­ing ²⁰²¹⁄₂₂ com­pared to pre­vi­ous years.

Stra­tegic Risk Management

1. The Stra­tegic Risk Register is presen­ted at Annex 3 to this paper. This sets out the most recent apprais­al of the Authority’s stra­tegic risk man­age­ment by the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee in Feb­ru­ary 2022 and by Man­age­ment Team in Janu­ary 2022.

2. One new risk in rela­tion to recruit­ment trends has been added to the cor­por­ate risk register since the last review by the Board.

Vicky Walk­er on behalf of Man­age­ment Team and Oper­a­tion­al Man­age­ment Group 4^th March 2022 davidcameron@​cairngorms.​co.​uk