On 26th January the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) announced its “Tarbet Visitor site” would be completely closed for 8 weeks from the 29th January as part of a £2.1m upgrade and after that the car parking area would be limited until late summer (see here).  Eight months later the works were still far from complete, as anyone who has passed the site on the West Shore of Loch Lomond will know, and access to the car parks has on occasions been completely blocked off.

The photo tells a tale, this is another example of failed project management  following on from the LLTNPA’s botched and much delayed upgrade of its headquarters at Carrochan (see here).

What was the plan?

The works announced for this year were part of a wider masterplan for the Tarbet site (see here) to be delivered in phases.  In July 2023 the LLTNPA granted planning permission to itself (the Head of Planning, Stuart Mearns, is also the Director of Place responsible for the development) for the “upgrade”:

The Decision Notice required the Park to provide to itself a Construction Environmental Management Plan before work started which included a “Construction timetable”.  That has never been published on the planning portal (see here) as would normally be the case – why not?

The work planned for this year was limited in extent to the cafe and toilets, the car parks and the area immediately around them.  To quote the LLTNPA:

That should have not been unduly difficult to deliver.  However, there appears to have been relatively little progress since May, when I had last visited, and October:

The main change to this part of the car park in the last five months, apart from the completion of the pavement, appears to be the new corporate National Park signage:

I am told, however, that part of the delay has been caused by the NEW surfacing having to be ripped up and replaced but have not been able to verify this,

 

Keeping a lid on what has gone wrong

Until government in Scotland starts being open and honest about when things go wrong it will never improve.  Formally, the body responsible for such governance in the National Park is the LLTNPA board and the formal means of keeping them informed about whether things are going to plan is through the updates on the Corporate Plan made at Board Meetings.  They may be dry but what those reports say about the Tarbet Visitor Site development is instructive:

While slightly behind schedule, in December staff reported the work should start after the Xmas/New Year break.  In fact it only started at the very end of January so, by that time, appears to have been running not two weeks but six weeks behind schedule.

By the March Board Meeting the project appeared to have caught up a bit:

 

At the June Board Meeting, progress on the project was reported in two places, the first the annual report on the operational plan for 2023-24.  This showed that originally the project was supposed to have been completed in 2023/24 and came up with some new reasons for the one month delay before year end, rock breaking and Japanese Knotweed:

The second report considered at the June Board was for the first quarter of the new financial year (or part of it).  It stated the project had caught up and it was still expected to open “late summer”:

At the Board meeting on 30th September, however, without any explanation of what had changed, it was reported the “main works” would be completed by early October:

This new completion date was just a few days after the Board Meeting and clearly completely off the mark given the state of the site at the end of October and the continued “disruption to site operations” caused by facilities being closed at the end of the month (see below).  Either the staff who contributed this to the report had not checked what was going on or it was a deliberate attempt by senior management to mislead their board.

What these extracts from the LLTNPA’s corporate planning documents demonstrate is that the public should have no faith in the corporate governance in the National Park.  The project development at Tarbe thas allegedly been delayed by various factors such as Xmas, Japanese Knotweed and the weather, then has miraculously made up time – suggesting the original timescales allowed plenty of leaway – before losing it again without explanation.

It is possible of course that the LLTNPA Board has considered the reasons for the delays in secret at their Audit and Risk Management Committee and has considered the lessons learned.  If so, those considerations and lessons deserve to be made public.

There is a hint, however, of what may have caused some of the problems in the report on the Place Strategy given to the June Board Meeting – costs have escalated considerably:

 

Disputes about those construction costs could have caused all sorts of delays with the contractor and will have signficant implications for the rest of the “place” programme on West Loch Lomond.

 

Failing to inform or help visitors

The main impact of these delays is on the public,  local people from the village of Tarbet and visitors at what is an important stopping off point at the junction of the A82 and A83.  What is an important site has been mostly unavailable for a whole year, contrary to the LLTNPA’s stated intentions.

In January the LLTNPA promised it would “provide regular updates about facilities to visitors and the local community between now and then” (i.e late summer) has never materialised and they have not  updated FAQs webpage (see here) about the development since the Spring:

While there have been occasional announcements on Facebook, eg announcing the toilets would be closed on 24-25th and 28-29th October when I visited (see here), there was nothing on site to say this let alone inform people of the location of the nearest public toilets:  I saw people trying to get around the heras fencing to the toilet block.  (Incidentally while the toilet block is being revamped as part of the plans my understanding is there is no increase in capacity, a missed opportunity given the popularity of the site for coach visits)..

Answers to other FAQs provided back in January were equally unhelpful:

“As the Grey and Black motorhome waste is closed for the duration of the works, visitors in Motorhomes and Campervans need to plan ahead and find a safe way to dispose of their Grey and Black waste.”

Your problem, guv, not ours!

 

Conclusion and lessons for local communities

The LLTNPA have made grand claims about its upgrade of the visitor site at Tarbet claiming this will “transform it into a sustainable low-carbon destination with expanded facilities for the community and for visitors”.  In truth, a cycle storage and maintenance facility along with an expanded car park with some Electric Vehicle charging points is going to do nothing to transform Tarbet into a low carbon destination.  Nor is planting a few trees going to create new native woodland as the LLTNPA has claimed – that takes time.

That it has taken a whole year for the LLTNPA to deliver these relatively minor “improvements” is incredible and the public deserve to be told why.  On past record, the LLTNPA are unlikely to do so willingly but others could force them to do so.

Given the project has been “supported by a £750,000 grant from VisitScotland’s Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund (RTIF)” they could start asking some questions about how their money has been used.  And the local Arrochar and Tarbet Community Development Trust could use the rights created by the Community Empowerment legislation to engage with with the LLTNPA about how it has managed the asset and whether handing it over to the local community might be better.  The CDT could hardly do worse than the incompetent LLTNPA has done to date.