A month ago I obtained the Cairngorm Mountain Business Plan 1st April 2020 – 31st March 2023, along with Highlands and Islands Enterprise’s operational agreement with Cairngorm Mountain Scotland Ltd, their fully owned subsidiary responsible for the plan, through Freedom of Information requests.  Both documents are heavily redacted (sorry still too many MB in size to add to this blog) and Highlands and Island Enterprise (HIE) has not yet published them on their website (see here).  This post takes a look at what the Business Plan, which commenced just a year ago, adds to what we know about HIE’s mis-management at Cairn Gorm.

The Business Plan (2020-23) and the Funicular Business Case

This extract illustrates HIE’s mindset. They had decided by last April that repairing the funicular was essential. This was before they had worked out whether this would be good use of public money, before they had presented their case to the Scottish Government last summer and before they were granted approval in October (see here).  The claim that CMSL “will require continual subsidy from its parent company HIE” if the funicular is not repaired, is ironic given that the Cabinet Secretary, Fergus Ewing, subsequently decided to commit up to £73 million in public subsidy to keep the funicular going over the next thirty years (see here).   The extract also shows that HIE are far more concerned about the funicular than snowsports, hence Cairngorm’s decline from “Scotland’s premier snow resort” to its worst.

Cairngorm Mountain’s share of the Scottish snowsports market has fallen off a cliff since 2013 (see here).  Note the 59,000 skier days recorded at Cairngorm in 2018. If market share had been maintained at the pre-2013 level, that number would have been around 100,000.  That figure was confirmed by an analysis of the number of days it was possible to ski back to the Day Lodge that year.

Setting aside 2018, which is the year the funicular broke down, the visitor numbers reported in the Business Case are very interesting compared to those presented in the Full business Case (FBC) a few months later:

The FBC projects 162,789 paying visitors a year, when in all three years before the funicular broke down numbers were significantly higher than this.  This should result in income being higher than projected in future, so why didn’t the Scottish Government challenge the numbers and reduce the amount of public subsidy it has committed releasing money to be spent elsewhere in the Highlands?   The answer is either that HIE wants to claim in future that it is exceeding its targets or that it has underestimated income because it knows that it has not properly worked out what it will actually cost to operate the funicular in future and needs to set money aside for this.

Insight into HIE’s past mis-management

This paragraph provides an admission, of sorts, that HIE failed to manage their contract with Natural Retreats properly, as Parkswatch pointed out time and again (see here and here for example), and once they took Cairngorm Mountain back into public ownership they had to pick up the tab for these failings. This contradicts the findings of the Audit Scotland report into HIE’s management of their contract with Natural Retreats (see here):“HIE assured itself that CML had appropriate maintenance and repair procedures in place to meet its obligations”.

The achievements for the year 2019-20 look pretty thin, the car park having been already in existence, so that that “project” consisted in an attempt to levy charges on those who had not damaged their vehicle by inadvertently hitting one of the pot holes. The accompany text showed 2314 people had used the tube slide by the end of October 2019 and 784 had paid to see the exhibition.  The latter was a paltry number and resulted in CMSL handing out free exhibition vouchers to local accommodation providers in the hope that that might increase custom at the cafe.

Gorm Speak

Far from acting as if Cairn Gorm is not theirs, HIE treats it as its own personal fiefdom – which is they the public road up to Cairn Gorm remains closed – and its record of looking after the mountain (apart from a short period in the 1990s when Adam Watson was employed to advise on how to restore past damage) is appalling.  But rather than read past posts, consider the training programme set out in the Business Case:

There is no training for staff, not even for rangers, on the natural environment at Cairn Gorm or how it should be managed.

A significant proportion of the unredacted part of the Business Plan consists of ticking Scottish Government policy boxes to make ministers purr:

How being transported up a mountain in a funicular contributes to a more active Scotland is not explained.  It should only have taken a little thought to appreciate that, apart from snowsports enthusiasts, waiting for the funicular ride only to sit down in the cafe at the top, is likely to make visitors less active, not more so.  And as every skier or boarder knows, funicular railways are frustrating precisely because they require so much hanging around.

If public authorities like HIE cannot ensure people, whether directly or indirectly employed, have proper contracts of employment and are paid the living wage, as set out in the “core aspects” of the business pledge, so help us. It is likely that CMSL is only signing up to a “majority” of the commitments on the right hand menu in the pledge because it knows the “Environmental Impact” of the funicular repairs will cause yet more damage to the mountain.

The secrecy culture

There is not a single financial figure in the Business Plan that has not been redacted. The reason HIE gave me for this was that:

“Information has been withheld under Section 33(1)(b) Commercial interests [of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act] and the economy where it is considered that disclosure would, or would be likely to, substantially prejudice the commercial interests of both CMSL and HIE”

AND

“Further information is also being withheld under Section 30(c) the Effective conduct of public affairs of FOISA as disclosure would undermine confidence in working relationships that HIE has with Cairngorm Mountain (Scotland) Limited (CMSL).”

This is a company that competes against nobody but is rather paid for by endless government subsidy.  It is a matter of public interest that it should account for how that subsidy has been spent and how it intends to spend the government largesse it receives in future. Instead, here is the proposed capital expenditure budget:

All of this proposed expenditure should have been set out in the much delayed Cairn Gorm masterplan, which HIE last said was due to be published in January this year.  The Business Plan suggests everything was agreed over a year ago.  Despite this, the Business Plan fails to make a single mention of the masterplan for Cairn Gorm or how the two documents relate.

The three appendices to the Business Plan setting out financial projections were all omitted from HIE’s FOI response and, as you can see from the above, the whole basis on which HIE has worked out projected cash flows and the need for public subsidy in future is blank.

Director’s remuneration

A key means by which HIE avoids accountability for its secrecy is by off-loading responsibility for managing Cairn Gorm onto its subsidiary company, CMSL.  The accounts of CMSL failed to mention of Director remuneration – had they done so they would have had to publish the sums involved – but the Business Plan does: