Earlier this week in my post on how the National Lottery now appears to be picking up a significant proportion of funding for Scotland’s National Parks (see here), I stated that Sandy Bremner, Convener of the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) had recently been appointed to the Scottish Committee of the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  That was wrong, he hasn’t and he has never applied.

My thanks to Grant Moir, Chief Executive of the CNPA for putting me right and my apologies to Sandy Bremner for any embarrassment or inconvenience caused.

Getting facts right is essential if we are to reform National Parks and the wider system and for effective campaigning.  I devote considerable efforts into trying to ensure my blog posts are based on evidence (whether photographs or documents), so it is worth a brief explanation of why I got the facts about Sandy so wrong.  It was totally my fault.

A few weeks ago, I (wrongly) picked up from somewhere that Sandy had been appointed to the NLHF.  People feed me information the whole time, for which I am very grateful.  Usually its true, or on the right track, but sometimes it is not – anyone can make mistakes.  So, when I decided to write about the reduction in direct funding for National Parks, as set out in the Scottish budget, and consider how that related to recent lottery funding announcements I recalled that information.  I then made a howler. I was in a rush to get the post out, found a NLHF feature on Sandy Bremner (see here) (which was actually a year ago) and assumed by its prominence it meant he was on the board.  Inexcusable!

The senseless thing was that whatever Sandy Bremner’s connections to the NLHF – and having funded the CNPA one might have expected the NLHF to feature him as board convener in their publicity – this was not essential to the case I was trying to make.  In my rush, I had also omitted all mention of CNPA board member Dr Fiona McLean (see here), who was already on the NLHF Committee for Scotland.  In other words, the Scottish Government had already orchestrated very close connections between the two National Park boards and the NLHF, so there was no need to appoint anyone else.

In correcting the error I have taken the opportunity to update the post and included some additional information about the power the Scottish Government has to issue policy directions to the NLHF trustees and Committee members.