Performance Paper 6 - Cairngorms Trust and CLLD update

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Per­form­ance Com­mit­tee Paper 6 23 March 2026 Page 1 of 7

For dis­cus­sion

Title: Cairngorms Trust and Com­munity Led Loc­al Devel­op­ment update

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

Pur­pose

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

The Per­form­ance 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 March 2025.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

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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.
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 18 months. Some poten­tial for EU audit remains until 10 years fol­low­ing pro­gramme closure.
Policy: Secure future CLLD of equi­val­ent value to LEAD­ER Pro­gramme allocation.	Green	Green	While no long term or multi-year com­mit­ment is in place, fund­ing alloc­a­tions to CLLD of £320,000, £403,000 and £400,000 over pri­or three years approached pre­vi­ous LEAD­ER Pro­gramme val­ues at an annu­al equi­val­ent level. Fund­ing for 2025⁄26 to date is £352,223 with alloc­a­tions in 2026⁄27 expec­ted to be broadly stat­ic. Budget papers pub­lished by Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment (SG) in Janu­ary 2026 set out indic­at­ive fore­casts of ​‘flat cash’ nation­al fund­ing to CLLD of £9.3m for 2026⁄27 and each of the fol­low­ing two years to 28⁄29.
Policy: Devel­op and imple­ment vol­un­tary giv­ing mech­an­isms through Cairngorms Trust.	Amber	Red	This remains a chal­len­ging area of work both in terms of capa­city to pro­gress and res­ults of ini­ti­at­ives. Cairngorms Trust has

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

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Per­form­ance Meas­ure	Pri­or Rat­ing	Cur­rent Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
			a new man­ager in place and will recon­sider approaches to this area of work along with the stake­hold­er group advising on the devel­op­ment of vol­un­tary giv­ing 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	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. How­ever, tests of vari­ous vol­un­tary giv­ing mech­an­isms con­tin­ue to high­light the dif­fi­culty of rais­ing sig­ni­fic­ant funds in a crowded vol­un­tary giv­ing sector.
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 has fea­tured as an exem­plar approach in Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment CLLD guid­ance. The Trust has tri­alled a sim­il­ar mod­el with a

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

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Per­form­ance Meas­ure	Pri­or Rat­ing	Cur­rent Rat­ing	Com­ment­ary
			black and eth­nic minor­ity lived exper­i­ence group. A num­ber of the Park Authority’s teams have also partnered with the Trust in offer­ing grants sup­port­ing com­munity led activ­ity in devel­op­ing nature net­works, cul­tur­al her­it­age, com­munity devel­op­ment and loc­al path work.

Stra­tegic context

1. The 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 CLLD fund­ing pro­gramme, deliv­er­ing the NPPP.
2. This object­ive has an asso­ci­ated action of devel­op and admin­is­ter a new com­munity-led devel­op­ment fund­ing stream.
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.
4. Deliv­ery of these NPPP and Cor­por­ate Plan actions to date is covered by this paper.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

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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 (C2030) match fund­ing not being secured. Anti­cip­ated CLLD fund­ing to be secured by the Cairngorms Trust totalling £1.25 mil­lion is incor­por­ated as match funding.
2. These stra­tegic risks are declin­ing at this time and are now mov­ing toward ​‘man­aged’ status giv­en the fund­ing pos­i­tion secured over pri­or years and expec­ted for ²⁰²⁶⁄₂₇ budget with level of CLLD fin­an­cing which matches our tar­get levels.
3. 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.

Deliv­ery Update

1. The Cairngorms Trust, work­ing with the Park Author­ity as its Account­able Body, has suc­cess­fully secured fund­ing of around £400,000 annu­ally in sup­port of CLLD activ­it­ies. 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. The Cairngorms Trust and the Park Author­ity have played a lead­er­ship role over the year in driv­ing activ­ity on cre­ation of a nation­al net­work cov­er­ing all 20 cur­rent Loc­al Action Groups (LAGs) to pro­mote, evid­ence advoc­ate for the role of CLLD fund­ing in nation­al policy. Scotland’s Nation­al CLLD Net­work will be estab­lished by the end of March 2026 and become act­ive in address­ing these object­ives over the com­ing fin­an­cial year. This work focuses on address­ing and deliv­er­ing the cor­por­ate plan object­ive of ​“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”.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

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1. The lack of con­firmed, or at least indic­at­ive, multi-year fund­ing alloc­a­tions to LAGs 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.
2. 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 Char­it­able Incor­por­ated Organ­isa­tion (SCIO) has been illus­trated as an aspect of good gov­ernance with­in the SG’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 SG’s CLLD guidance.
3. Around £75,000 has been spent annu­ally over the last couple of years by the Park Author­ity and Cairngorms Trust in part­ner­ship, in sup­port of the devel­op­ment and oper­a­tion of the Youth LAG and to sup­port the wider oper­a­tion of the Cairngorms Youth Action Team (CYAT). This has covered coordin­at­or costs of around £30,000 (a self-employed con­tract), a fund for dis­tri­bu­tion of grants, and meet­ing / res­id­en­tial costs sup­port­ing the engage­ment of the young people and devel­op­ment of the Youth LAG / CYAT, togeth­er with sup­port­ing the wider oper­a­tion­al work of the CYAT as part of the Park Authority’s learn­ing and engage­ment activities.
4. The Trust has tri­alled a sim­il­ar mod­el to that estab­lished with the Youth LAG with a black and eth­nic minor­ity lived exper­i­ence group, work­ing through a lived exper­i­ence group to deploy a small ini­tial grant fund totalling £6,500 to sup­port pro­jects with­in that com­munity in the Cairngorms.

Man­age­ment and Governance

1. The Memor­andum of Under­stand­ing (MoU) gov­ern­ing rela­tion­ships between the Trust and the Park Author­ity has been updated dur­ing ²⁰²⁵⁄₂₆. This is presen­ted at Annex 1 to this paper.
2. The C2030 Pro­gramme will see the incep­tion of the Cairngorms Com­munity Fund Pro­ject deliv­er­ing grant funds on the basis of codesigned grant cri­ter­ia in the course of the com­ing year. There are plans in place for the Codesign Pan­el to

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

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dis­cuss its plans with the Cairngorms Trust as part of the codesign pro­cess, while man­age­ment will con­tin­ue to man­age risks around this pro­cess. This sub­ject will be dealt with sep­ar­ately through a paper to the forth­com­ing full board meeting.

Dav­id Camer­on 03 March 2026 DavidCameron@​cairngoms.​co.​uk