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Resources Paper 1 & Annex 1 - Finance monitoring

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Resources Com­mit­tee Paper 1 15 May 2026 Page 1 of 6

For dis­cus­sion

Title: Fin­ance monitoring

Pre­pared by: Louise Allen, Head of Fin­ance and Cor­por­ate Operations

Pur­pose

This paper presents a view of the Park Authority’s fin­an­cial pos­i­tion at the start of the 2026⁄27 fin­an­cial year. It includes an estim­ate of the out­turn pos­i­tion for the fin­an­cial year 2025⁄26, togeth­er with the budget man­age­ment pos­i­tion at the end of April — month one of the 2026⁄27 fin­an­cial year.

Recom­mend­a­tions

The Resources Com­mit­tee is asked to: a) Note the estim­ated out­turn pos­i­tion for the 2025⁄26 fin­an­cial year. b) Con­sider the budget man­age­ment pos­i­tion for 2026⁄27.

Out­turn 2025 – 26

  1. After sig­ni­fic­ant activ­ity in the final months of 2025⁄26, with oper­a­tion­al teams work­ing hard to ensure deliv­ery of pro­jects before the end of the fin­an­cial year, the pos­i­tion repor­ted to Scot­tish Gov­ern­ment (SG) is shown in the table below:
Estim­ated outturn
To date £C2030 con­tri­bu­tion £Estim­ated accruals £Total £Resource £Cap­it­al £
SALARY6,183,2456,183,2456,183,245
GOODS & SERVICES2,889,935187,8203,077,7553,077,755
INDIR­ECT CAPITAL3,898,964450,0001,097,1655,446,1295,446,129
DIR­ECT CAPITAL211,44126,090237,531237,531
13,183,586450,0001,311,07514,944,6619,261,0005,683,660
  1. The Fin­ance Team is work­ing to firm up accru­als as we devel­op the pos­i­tion to be repor­ted in the annu­al report and accounts for the year. The work car­ried out will ensure that all costs relat­ing to deliv­ery in the 2025⁄26 year are prop­erly recor­ded, and will con­tin­ue into May, as invoices are received and estim­ates refined. Cur­rently the estim­ate of expendit­ure to be accrued is £1.3 mil­lion, split across peat­land res­tor­a­tion, oth­er oper­a­tion­al plan deliv­ery and run­ning costs.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Resources Com­mit­tee Paper 1 15 May 2026 Page 2 of 6

  1. The pos­i­tion shown above also includes the com­mit­ted annu­al con­tri­bu­tion of £450,000 to Cairngorms 2030 (C2030).

  2. This com­pares with the budget alloc­a­tion of £15.131 mil­lion on which we have been report­ing to SG through­out the year:

Resource £Cap­it­al £
Nation­al Parks Grant in Aid — Resource7,866,000
Deer Man­age­ment50,000
Nation­al Parks Grant in Aid — Capital1,750,000
Peat­land grant — capital3,620,000
Peat­land grant — resource — staff650,000
8,566,0005,370,000
Nature Res­tor­a­tion Fund695,000500,000
Total budget allocation9,261,0005,870,000
Estim­ated outturn9,261,0005,683,660
Under / (over) spent(0)186,340

  1. The pro­jec­ted under­spend includes the anti­cip­ated under­spend on peat­land res­tor­a­tion of £80,000.

  2. Any remain­ing under­spend will be applied to advance the Park Authority’s con­tri­bu­tion to C2030.

  3. It should be emphas­ised that the accru­als pos­i­tion is very much an estim­ate at present. How­ever, the risk of under / over­spend at 31 March 2026 can be mit­ig­ated through the Park Authority’s con­tri­bu­tion to C2030. This is already £300,000 in advance of com­mit­ment, which means that we are in a pos­i­tion to amend the con­tri­bu­tion for 2025⁄26 to either increase or decrease funds passed to the programme.

  4. These fig­ures are sub­ject to change as the Fin­ance Team final­ises the clos­ing pos­i­tion for the year. Fur­ther updates will be brought to the Resources Com­mit­tee and to the Audit and Risk Com­mit­tee to sup­port its work in over­see­ing the extern­al audit of the final accounts.

Budget mon­it­or­ing 2026⁄27

  1. Fund­ing from SG has now been con­firmed and is in line with the fig­ures used in the budget mod­el approved by the Board in March:

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Resources Com­mit­tee Paper 1 15 May 2026 Page 3 of 6

Resource £’000Cap­it­al £’000
Nation­al Parks Grant in Aid — Resource8,560
Nation­al Parks Grant in Aid — Capital2,085
Peat­land res­tor­a­tion — capital3,500
Peat­land res­tor­a­tion — resource705
Nature Res­tor­a­tion Fund800245
Com­munity Led Loc­al Development364
10,4295,830

Staff costs

  1. As is cus­tom­ary at this time of the year, we report to the Resources Com­mit­tee on the pos­i­tion, against budget, of the cost of April payroll, in order to test the suf­fi­ciency of the budget alloc­a­tion for staff costs.

  2. The budgeted invest­ment in staff for 2026⁄27 has been set at £6.45 mil­lion, equi­val­ent to 40% of the total expendit­ure budget resourced by SG funding.

  3. The actu­al value of payroll costs in April 2026, which include the annu­al pay award, were £530,000. A mean­ing­ful com­par­is­on of the actu­al cost incurred in April against budget requires a split of the full year’s payroll budget across 12 months, but with adjust­ment to recog­nise that the costs for sea­son­al staff are incurred only between April and Octo­ber. On this basis, payroll costs would be expec­ted to be £556,000; actu­al costs are there­fore £26,000 less than might have been expec­ted (4.7% under budget).

  4. There are a num­ber of factors that affect the dis­tri­bu­tion of cost across the year. These include the employ­ment of sea­son­al staff, the tim­ing of vacancy sav­ings and pen­sion options chosen by new staff. Nev­er­the­less, on the basis of April pro­jec­tions, it would appear that the payroll budget is a reas­on­able reflec­tion of the likely staff costs expec­ted for the year.

  5. Giv­en the sig­ni­fic­ance of payroll costs as a per­cent­age of the total organ­isa­tion­al expendit­ure budget, the Fin­ance Team and the Seni­or Man­age­ment Team (SMT) will play close atten­tion to this budget pos­i­tion over the early months of the year to determ­ine wheth­er any budget real­loc­a­tions are needed.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Resources Com­mit­tee Paper 1 15 May 2026 Page 4 of 6

Pro­gramme management

  1. At its last meet­ing, the Com­mit­tee reques­ted report­ing on the per­form­ance of the C2030 pro­gramme. To start this cycle of report­ing, the spend to date to the end of March 2026 is provided in Annex 1, togeth­er with a pro­jec­tion of spend­ing to the end of the programme.

  2. Work cost­ing just under £11 mil­lion has been delivered to date and has been fully covered by income from the Nation­al Lot­tery Her­it­age Fund (NLHF), SG, Trans­port Scot­land and oth­er pub­lic sec­tor part­ners. The con­tri­bu­tion from the Park Author­ity to date has been £1.335 mil­lion (out of a total com­mit­ment of £2.25 mil­lion over the life of the programme).

  3. The next two years of the pro­gramme require sig­ni­fic­ant annu­al expendit­ure of between £8 mil­lion and £9 mil­lion. The most sig­ni­fic­ant expendit­ure will be through the pro­jects: a) Peat­land res­tor­a­tion b) Cli­mate resi­li­ent catch­ments c) Com­munity man­aged grants d) Act­ive travel communities

  4. We con­tin­ue to dis­cuss fund­ing con­tri­bu­tions with part­ners, our most recent com­mit­ment being £600,000 from High­land and Islands Enter­prise (HIE).

  5. The latest cash flow fore­cast indic­ates the need for £1.225 mil­lion of cash flow advant­age from the receipt of cash in advance of core needs through Grant-in-Aid. In order to cov­er this, the cash draw down agreed with SG has been designed to provide some front-load­ing of income. Assum­ing that the pro­file of core expendit­ure incurred in 2026⁄27 is sim­il­ar to that exper­i­enced in 2025⁄26, then, from the end of July onwards, cash drawn down should be in advance of expendit­ure by at least £1.225 mil­lion, allow­ing the Park Author­ity to sup­port the cash flow require­ments of the C2030 programme.

Oper­a­tion­al plan and overheads

  1. With the excep­tion of monthly payroll costs (dis­cussed above) there has been very little spend in April (circa £50,000). This is typ­ic­al of this early part of the year, when much of the work under­taken is either plan­ning for the year’s deliv­ery, or com­ple­tion of work fun­ded from the 2025⁄26 budget allocation.

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Resources Com­mit­tee Paper 1 15 May 2026 Page 5 of 6

Sum­mary

  1. The key points arising from the review of the fin­an­cial pos­i­tion at the end of April 2026 are: a) Work is under­way to close the accounts for 2025⁄26; out­turn for the year is anti­cip­ated to be close to break even, with flex­ib­il­ity provided through the poten­tial to vary the con­tri­bu­tion to the C2030 pro­gramme. b) Con­firmed fund­ing from SG is in line with that anti­cip­ated in the budget agreed by the Board in March. c) Ini­tial indic­a­tions are that the payroll budget provided for the year will be suf­fi­cient. d) Deliv­ery of the third year of the C2030 pro­gramme has com­menced. To date, income received has been suf­fi­cient to cov­er costs incurred. e) Run­ning costs and oper­a­tion­al plan expendit­ure in month one reflects the pat­tern of spend­ing exper­i­enced in pri­or years.

Louise Allen 28 April 2026 louiseallen@​cairngorms.​co.​uk

Cairngorms Nation­al Park Author­ity Ugh­dar­ras Pàirc Nàiseanta a’ Mhon­aidh Ruaidh

Resources Com­mit­tee Paper 1 Annex 1 15 May 2026 Page 6 of 6

Annex 1 — C2030 pro­gramme expenditure

Pro­jectTotal pro­gramme budget £Actu­alRemain­ing pro­gramme budget £Pro­jec­ted spendLeg­acy £
2023 – 24 £2024 – 25 £2025 – 26 £To date £2026 – 27 £2027 – 28 £2028 – 29 £
1Wood­land expansion258,0000049,67749,677208,323123,00085,32300
2Peat­land Res­tor­a­tion — capital12,000,00003,053,3093,276,2176,329,5265,670,4743,000,0002,670,47400
3Nature Recov­ery1,458,1200167,00080,000247,0001,211,120540,000433,000238,1200
4Cairngorms Future Farming640,060054,755104,578159,333480,727200,000185,05095,6770
5Cli­mate Resi­li­ent Catchments1,506,960037,91596,944134,8601,372,1001,117,633208,16422,30324,000
6Green fin­ance and com­munity wealth building34,1760711,7451,81632,36029,1763,18400
7Well­being Economy27,00003,0002,4045,40421,5962,4009,5989,5980
8Pub­lic Health and the Outdoors12,000932,1601,4813,7348,2662,6003,2382,4280
9Demen­tia Activ­ity Centre515,46141,85784,20765,098191,161324,30098,377129,09996,8240
10Land­scape and Communities165,04803,6802,3516,031159,01768,40080,8179,8000
11Effect­ive Com­munity Engagement660,0001,07020,73056,54378,343581,657259,347127,800194,5100
12Cli­mate Learn­ing and Education48,0003844,4133,1867,98340,01712,30015,83811,8780
13Cli­mate Con­scious Communities48,00002791,0121,29146,70910,40020,74815,5610
14Com­munity Arts & Cul­ture Programme99,00004,04610,83414,88084,12033,10029,15421,8660
15Com­munity Man­aged Grant Scheme2,262,0000522,322290,078812,4001,449,600503,500504,914378,68662,500
16Research and Know­ledge Exchange364,8001,22947,77427,30676,309288,49189,336113,80385,3530
17Cycle Friendly Cairngorms850,200077,36696,378173,744676,456488,792107,80019,86460,000
18Act­ive Travel Communities7,062,349010,889377,750388,6396,673,7101,000,0002,250,0002,964,512459,198
19Sus­tain­able Transport439,80005,0008,57913,579426,221175,000143,555107,6660
20Travel beha­viour change96,00003,71632,04635,76260,23854,0313,2073,0000
Whole pro­gramme
Staff­ing5,413,908111,653987,8541,137,4792,236,9863,176,9221,172,3951,145,444859,0830
Oth­er staff costs96,000964,3321,9386,36689,63417,20041,39131,0430
Con­tin­gency603,0000000603,00000603,0000
Infla­tion320,0000000320,00000320,0000
TOTAL34,979,882156,3825,094,8195,723,62310,974,82424,005,0588,850,4908,458,0986,090,772605,698