Feedback on Workshops
Chris Gledhill, NPO Brecon Beacons National Park
The first question that we had to address was ‘How will National Park Authorities meet the expectations of the Welsh Assembly Government whilst addressing expected financial pressures over the next 3-5 years’ and that certainly was very relevant in light of the announcements of the Budget earlier this week.
In the group that I chaired we had very, very active discussions and five areas that we focused on:
1. How could we increase our costs, obvious things would be car parking but also there’s other services which we operate so was there a way that we could increase those costs? Increased costs for services gives more income. The second area then is if we were more entrepreneurial in terms of the way that we did things and the way that we offered services – key rooms? Retail merchandising, access to walking maps on the internet. There might be a way that we could generate income. We then began to think about tourist tax. We get large number of people staying in our National Parks so why don’t we be radical, why don’t we charge a bed tax for people who stay in the area? The other element was that local councils feel that they’re funding the costs of the National Parks.
2. The second area was considering the statutory purposes and duties of National Parks and how could be link these into the aspirations in the policy statement. How are we going to balance our purposes and duties with the policy statement? We had quite a debate in the group that I was in looking at planning policies to better fit the aspirations of the local communities and I think there’s a challenge there for us and it’s one that we really should be taking on board. I think that given here, whatever we do, it’s always the balancing act – it’s never going to be an easy choice and you’ve got to weigh up the different aspirations. We have clear statutory responsibilities and duties but these external expectations of the Assembly sometimes does mean that we could always be in conflict but we always manage to try and find a way to balance them. We had a long debate about the community and young people. Young people leave the area. Why do they leave the area? What can we do to keep them within the area? The final area that we had a debate discussion on was a sense of ownership in the National Park. How can we take that forward? The areas that we then focused in on to maybe deal with this is that rather than planning for houses we actually plan for homes and communities. If we can get the communities and the homes element right we can get that vibrancy in the community spirit. Create more choice and opportunities for young people to keep them in the community – can we do it? How do we do it? If we can get the youngsters engaged in our activities at an early stage then they will have greater understanding and appreciation of National Parks and what they can do within National Parks.
3. The third area was a question that both breakouts sessions addressed and that was ‘Can you identify any key challenges’, how National Parks should be prioritising these. This is very much summarised, we could have had about 20 different slides on this. Climate change, it is something which is impacting on every one of us, every one of our organisations, every community large and small. So how can we take on board climate change and of course within that we have to take on board the many aspects of sustainability and biodiversity. Transport issues – how do we get our heads around it. In our part of the world in Brecon Beacons it’s very difficult to use public transport. It’s not non-existent but it’s not there at the times that we would normally want to access it. Renewable energy – all the Parks are doing great jobs in looking at renewable energies, supporting renewable energy schemes but how can we go up to that next level and there is an example – the amount of money which goes into wind power where we often are spending small amounts of money, a few thousand pounds, rather than £10,000-£20,000 so can we re-address renewable energy in a more strategic way. Again, this question about engagement and ownership. We’ve got to find more effective ways to go out and engage with the public so that they have ownership of the work that we do. Sustainable healthy communities and local employment – looking at homes and communities rather than just building houses. Access – that’s access in all its definitions. Access to services, access to the countryside, access to the special qualities which we are charged with looking after and then better use of planning systems to deliver these. Can we be innovative, to use the planning system, one of the questions we were asked that came back from the group was what actually makes National Parks different? We’ve got to get that point across so we need to demonstrate that otherwise we’re just the same as any other rural community. We’ve got to think really hard as National Park Authorities and members and officers as to what makes National Parks so different. Branding – sometimes when you’re a National Park, you don’t actually know you’re in a National Park and so again it’s getting people to sort of feel that association with the area that they’re in and that is special. Finally in this one – better marketing. Again we know that we’re icons of tourist destinations, the marketing doesn’t always link up and we do know the amount of money which comes in from tourism through people coming to National Parks so how can we better work together for marketing. Of course we’re not marketing bodies – that a responsibility for others and I’ve linked to this changing perceptions because people have a range of perceptions about National Parks. We had one or two of them yesterday and I was always told that perception is reality so if there are perceptions, negative perceptions about National Parks, we have an opportunity to do something about it, you can change them.
4. The fourth area was what other partner bodies should we be linking up with and there are some of them coming from the second group ranging from employers, all of our departments which have a relevance to National Parks through that list on the left and then on the right sectors like the voluntary sector, charitable trust often can have a big, big impact to deliver projects better sometimes than the National Parks and are obvious partners. Education and training sector – how can we get them involved? How can we work with them to deliver these aspirations? Housing bodies – we’ve got to work with them. And the rescue and safety services – again not necessarily an obvious partner but we have used them recently and have used projects in the Brecon Beacons and been hugely successful.
5. Finally, this whole aspect of deliverability. How can we assess our ability to deliver the different services? Two cautionary things – don’t set too many. If we’ve got too many pots that we’ve got to put beans into and count them, it’s not actually going to assess the impact that National Parks are having on the communities, on businesses, the landscape and the environment and secondly we’ve got to be able to measure the impact and the benefits. Sometimes we measure indicators which are really meaningless and it doesn’t help people understand the impact or the benefits to the communities and the users of the services.
Nick Wheeler, NPO Pembrokeshire Coast National Park
We had a very good discussion and I’d like to make a point of thanking everyone for contributing so well yesterday in what was a very short period of time. We actually raced through some of the questions but I think we got a very high level of dialogue and level of discussion and I’m very grateful for that. The second session if you remember looked at the Making the Connections agenda, citizens of the centre, equality and social justice, working together in the Welsh public service and value for money but I think, rather flowing over from the first session we all agreed that there were severe links between the Making the Connections agenda and the One Wales agenda. In other words we couldn’t ignore the government agenda, the political consequences of working within the Welsh scene as we know it now and therefore there were political imperatives we needed to take on board and maybe in terms of making sure we turn our own work programme to fit that, the old Kennedy quote if I don’t misquote it is one which perhaps we should remember “Ask not what your government can do for you but what you can do for your government”, in other words how can we, as National Park Authorities, add value, keep our relevance and help deliver the governments new agenda and key priorities and I think that’s something we all need to keep in the back of our minds.
The first question we were asked to address in the session was ‘How will National Park Authorities raise their individual and collective profiles amongst partners especially as they engage with local service boards?’ Obviously using the Section 62 process is the first way of raising our profile but I think the point we were making is we needed to understand the work of our partners as well as them understanding us. We need to understand their agenda and monitor their delivery of our agreement. We need to make our work more relevant and emphasise the people agenda as well as the natural environment agenda to keep ourselves on a number of these. We need to work together to raise awareness and to collaborate more as we’re doing on the planning front now on customer surveys and feedback, making sure that our services are in tune with what’s going on and piggy-backing if you like on a number of these surveys which I’m sure are done by your own unitary authorities back at home. One of the tricks of raising our profile obviously is to get people to feel that they actually own the Park in which they live or where they come to and to concentrate on getting the right messages across, the old redhead ones if you like, National Parks are places where good things happen and bad things don’t. Accentuate the positive messages as well as the negative ones and emphasise if we need to the value of National Park location to rural stakeholders, particularly tourist businesses. I remember one of my old districts in the old county days moved to get rid of the National Park at one stage and all of a sudden, out of the woodwork, came support for the National Park. Most of those of course came from self-interest, tourist undertakings, people whose National Park location added financial to their benefit and I think that’s something we need to remember quite often. We need to play our part in contributing to other people’s plans, half the trick is to get other people to do our work for us isn’t it, and you can’t do that if you don’t get your vision and your priorities into spatial plan, community strategies, LSP plans, whatever they are, if you look at your first level of community strategies I think you’ll find that there are very little National Park input into it. For those of us who were in that process, we were just glad to be at the table.
The next one has to actually have National Park messages right in the core of it. We need to clarify, this is probably aimed at government and CCW, we need to clarify the contradictory advice on the relationship between National Park management plans, community strategies and the Wales spatial plan. Certainly the latest document on community strategies is completely opposite to the advice contained within the preparation of National Park management plans, so there is an issue there. We need to focus on what we really do well and the value we add to aid recognition. If you concentrate on the positive stuff, that will raise our profile. We need to be positive in all we do and I’ve probably offended some in my group by saying that you as members have a role here. If you talk down the planning system and listen to yourself in your next development control meeting, as some of the comments you made, if you talk down the planning system you’ll perpetuate perceptions so I think we all need to be positive in what we do. We need to use the skills we have in National Parks, skills as facilitators, as champion, as co-ordinators for wider agendas and that’s one of the skills that Sue was talking about, that we can bring to the table. We need to ensure clarity of outcomes and priorities across the three Parks, we don’t need to send confused messages. They must be messages that people understand. So that’s a few from the first one.
The second question we identified was ‘How will National Parks meet the expectations of the Making the Connections agenda while addressing the expected’. There are financial pressures over the next three to five years and the answers here as you can see from the two groups were – we need to achieve more through the work and programme of others, that’s a point I’ve already made coming up again. We need to explore the capacity and potential for greater sharing and collaboration. As Sue again mentioned earlier this morning, we’ve done that – we’re doing that. It is actually difficult because of the size, the scale and the geography of the three Parks. It’s actually very difficult to arrange sharing amongst us. More easy for us to arrange that sharing in our local public service context than between ourselves but that shouldn’t mean that we don’t keep on trying to identify it. We need to involve the voluntary sector more, huge potential of expertise out there in the voluntary sector. Now widely recognised, you can use input of people at a certain rate per hour, £7.50 or whatever it is, and you can use voluntary input and convert it into financial means in that way.
This one didn’t come out of my group but it’s probably a good idea but it came I think from someone in the other group ‘It takes two to tango’. In other words you need partners in a partnership, in a Making the Connections partnership to be prepared to unlock the ideas. If the other side isn’t playing, there’s very little you can do. Use customer research more to refine deliveries, back to that one I had on the last slide about user surveys so there are connections between the answers from the two groups on these two questions. The feeling is the funding is still the key, there’s not enough money there to take everything forward and we’re going to have to have to make some very difficult choices as we go into the era in front of us.
The last question, very much like one that was in the first session. ‘What key indicators should National Park Authorities be judged upon by the Welsh Assembly Government and others’. I think there are a couple of fundamental questions the groups asked here.
First of all, are we being judged from the right indicators? How do you measure quality of life and should we be measuring things like the outdoor health agenda rather than the delivery of planning applications? Again, how do you measure our main role as enablers and facilitators instead of delivery. If we’re facilitating good things, it’s very difficult to measure that. I recall, some of you may remember, in 1982 an efficiency and economy review was undertaken by Price Waterhouse or Arthur Young McLellan & Moores I think it was in those days, and the consultants there came up with 70 odd indicators and we took them through it and at the end after four days we ended up with two and they accepted that much of National Park work is very difficult to measure because it is about changing hearts & minds and persuading people to take a particular view. But we need to be more radical and innovative and think outside the box as I said. We need to make more use of SPF funding and I think that’s a message that came back from the review. Using more to unlock WAG priorities and our own priorities. Don’t just respond to the ideas that come in, but actually be a bit more pro-active about going out and using it to drive our own agendas, capture the voluntary sector input of our work. That should perhaps be a key indicator. The need to repeat measuring to develop trends. Don’t just measure once, you can only get meaningful indicators if you do it over a period of time using comparative data to get trends and trends are more important than just pictures taken out of the blue.
Another one that’s come back from the first session – use the planning system more to our advantage. The delivery of affordable housing, sustainable development generally, can we get indicators around that? Performance of members in governments and NPA’s came up. I didn’t raise it, a member raised it but it is very valid – we’re all being measured. I’m getting into dangerous ground but I will say it anyway because my Chairman and I have had a talk about that as well. If you’re a member of a Park Authority, you are expected to contribute. I turned out one-third of my members and that disappoints me, the one-third I turned out are the really hard-workers that turn out to everything. How do we get the others to turn out? I think there has to be some acceptance of the need for some level of performance monitoring and indicators in response to all our commitments – staff and members. Otherwise we’re not going to get the democracy which produces from that. Energy efficiency, reducing our carbon footprint is an obvious one which is fairly easy to measure and I think that is one which needs to go on now to meet the ‘Climate Change’ agenda. I think we feel we haven’t used the WLGA facilities and services enough – whether it’s an indicator I don’t know but there is a feeling perhaps that we hadn’t done that and budgetary performance is an obvious indicator which we need to do. I think at the end of the day, in terms of indicators, in terms of our work, someone asked the question ‘Should we concentrate on pleasing WAG, why are we always pleasing my ministers and politicians’. Really at the end of the day we ought to be more concerned about satisfying the community and citizen needs rather than just the political aspirations and whims of a particular day. That is going to be difficult to balance, because if we don’t satisfy the political agenda, we won’t get the funding to continue to satisfy the long-term citizen agenda but I think that one of the comments one of the groups made is that we should be about long-termism, thinking long term, politicians by the nature of their occupation can’t/don’t. Our job ought to be to look long-term and the indicators which we produce should be geared towards that.
