250124Paper2Annex1BudgetRisks

Annex 1, Paper 2 Resources Com­mit­tee 24 Janu­ary 2024 Page 1 of 4

Annex 1

Budget Risks

Risk num­ber	Budget area	Descrip­tion of risk	Mit­ig­a­tion	Budget alloc­a­tion 25⁄26 £’000	Budget alloc­a­tion 24⁄25 £’000
1	Fund­ing Nature Res­tor­a­tion Fund	Nature res­tor­a­tion deliv­ery is a key aim for the Park Author­ity. The avail­ab­il­ity of fund­ing through the Nature Res­tor­a­tion Fund is uncertain.	Suf­fi­cient budget alloc­a­tion is made to sup­port pri­or­ity deliv­ery in this area from grant-in-aid (CDEL). Budget alloc­a­tion of £220k has been made from grant-in-aid to enable this deliv­ery regard­less of wheth­er fund­ing is avail­able through NRF.		300
2	Fund­ing CLLD	The amount of fund­ing avail­able for Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment is uncer­tain. The expect­a­tion is that awards should sup­port mainly cap­it­al projects.	Poten­tial inter­ac­tions between CLLD pro­jects and cli­mate adapt­a­tion pro­jects and oth­er grant fund­ing ini­ti­at­ives will be explored to max­im­ise the com­munity bene­fits achieved through the two funds.	350	300

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Risk num­ber	Budget area	Descrip­tion of risk	Mit­ig­a­tion	Budget alloc­a­tion 25⁄26 £’000	Budget alloc­a­tion 24⁄25 £’000
3	Staff costs	Staff costs have been mod­elled at £6million for the year, based on the nego­ti­ated three-year pay deal and a full com­ple­ment of staff. Some posts with­in the staff cohort are cur­rently vacant but are likely to be filled early in the 25⁄26 fin­an­cial year.	Vacancy sav­ings and recruit­ment delays have been sig­ni­fic­ant dur­ing 24⁄25 and are expec­ted to res­ult in under­spend against the full year payroll budget of around £250,000. Much of this sav­ing res­ul­ted from intern­al recruit­ment to C2030 posts, with the con­sequent require­ment for extern­al recruit­ment to back­fill core posts.	(200)	(71)
4	Vacancy sav­ings	Vacancy sav­ings become avail­able if recruit­ment to vacant posts is delayed, either by the Park Author­ity delib­er­ately, or because of lack of avail­ab­il­ity of suit­able can­did­ates. It is dif­fi­cult to pre­dict the value of such savings.	Now that the C2030 pro­gramme is at full com­ple­ment, staff move­ment is expec­ted to be con­sid­er­ably less than in 24⁄25. A prudent estim­ate of the poten­tial value of vacancy sav­ings has been included in the budget; if sav­ings exceed this amount, budget will be real­loc­ated to enable addi­tion­al deliv­ery against the Oper­a­tion­al Plan.

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Risk num­ber	Budget area	Descrip­tion of risk	Mit­ig­a­tion	Budget alloc­a­tion 25⁄26 £’000	Budget alloc­a­tion 24⁄25 £’000
5	Cli­mate adapt­a­tion fund	The suc­cess of this fund in 24⁄25 has raised the expect­a­tion that it will be avail­able again in 25⁄26. Com­pet­ing pri­or­it­ies for budget alloc­a­tion have restric­ted the amount of grant-in-aid avail­able to provide this fund. Con­sequently, applic­a­tions may exceed avail­able funds.	Poten­tial inter­ac­tions between CLLD pro­jects and cli­mate adapt­a­tion pro­jects will be explored to max­im­ise the com­munity bene­fits achieved through the two funds.	200	370
6	Run­ning costs	Infla­tion­ary pres­sures, tech­no­lo­gic­al improve­ments and an increased staff cohort com­bine to present a chal­lenge for cost management.	Infla­tion­ary increase of 2.6% has been applied to ongo­ing run­ning costs. Sig­ni­fic­ant addi­tion­al ongo­ing cost (£70,000) is anti­cip­ated when our Idox plan­ning data­base is upgraded to the most recent cloud ver­sion. Poten­tial sav­ings in run­ning costs of £70,000 have been iden­ti­fied but have not been incor­por­ated into the budget at this stage of its development.	26 70	- 16

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Risk num­ber	Budget area	Descrip­tion of risk	Mit­ig­a­tion	Budget alloc­a­tion 25⁄26 £’000	Budget alloc­a­tion 24⁄25 £’000
7	Con­tri­bu­tion to C2030 programme	Delay in fund­ing decisions over C2030 trans­port pro­jects cre­ates sig­ni­fic­ant risk over their com­ple­tion by the end of the term of the programme.	Fund­ing of £450k per annum was com­mit­ted as part of the grant applic­a­tion. Addi­tion­al con­tri­bu­tion from core fund­ing would allow the devel­op­ment of designs and mit­ig­ate the risk of fur­ther fund­ing delays.	450 338	450 -