Annex 3

Budget Risks

Risk num­ber	Budget area	Descrip­tion of risk	Stra­tegic Risk Register ref­er­ence	Impacts and con­sid­er­a­tions	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 (NFR) is uncertain.	1 – Authority’s abil­ity to fund deliv­ery depend­ent on fund­ing set­tle­ment from Scot­tish Government	NRF fund­ing of £220,000 is assumed to be avail­able to the Author­ity. Receipt of this fund­ing would leave the cap­it­al (CDEL) budget in sur­plus. This sur­plus will not be alloc­ated to deliv­ery until con­firm­a­tion of NRF fund­ing is received.	220	300
2	Fund­ing Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment (CLLD)	The amount of fund­ing avail­able for CLLD 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
3	Staff costs	Staff costs have been mod­elled at £6 mil­lion 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 2025⁄26 fin­an­cial year.	14 — Flex­ib­il­ity of work­force to respond to changes in oper­a­tion­al scale	Vacancy sav­ings and recruit­ment delays have been sig­ni­fic­ant dur­ing 2024⁄25 and are expec­ted to res­ult in under­spend against the full year payroll budget of around £300,000. Much of this sav­ing res­ul­ted from intern­al recruit­ment to C2030 posts, with the con­sequent require­ment for extern­al recruit­ment to back­fill core posts.	(150)	(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.	7 — explores the impact of staff costs on the budget; the risk is noted as man­aged, such that its risk score is now equal to the tar­get score based on risk appetite	Now that the C2030 pro­gramme is at full com­ple­ment, staff move­ment is expec­ted to be con­sid­er­ably less than in 2024⁄25. 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.
5	Cli­mate adapt­a­tion fund	The suc­cess of this fund in 2024⁄25 has raised the expect­a­tion that it will be avail­able again in 2025⁄26. Com­pet­ing pri­or­it­ies for budget alloc­a­tion have restric­ted the amount of grant-in-aid avail­able to provide this fund. Con­sequently, applic­a­tions may exceed avail­able funds.	1 – Authority’s abil­ity to fund deliv­ery depend­ent on fund­ing set­tle­ment from Scot­tish Government	Poten­tial inter­ac­tions between CLLD pro­jects and cli­mate adapt­a­tion pro­jects will be explored to max­im­ise the com­munity bene­fits achieved through the two funds. Poten­tial increase in fund levels sub­ject to con­firm­a­tion of fund­ing alloc­a­tions to Nature Res­tor­a­tion and res­ol­u­tion of oth­er budget assumptions.	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 is anti­cip­ated when our Idox plan­ning data­base is upgraded to the most recent cloud version.	25  104	- 30