Role of the Department
As the name suggests, we are the support and administrative hub for the Authority. The team includes 16 full and part time staff as well as colleagues from North Yorkshire Council who help us with our legal and financial services.
We enable our colleagues to concentrate on their important work by providing a very reliable IT system that functions as well at home as it does in the office, we support all of our people whether they are paid staff, volunteers or members of our Board. Other areas of our work include setting our budgets, paying out invoices and ourselves, dealing with insurance and risk management, health and safety, training and development and property management. Our external contracts provide expertise in legal, technical and financial matters as well the statutory Monitoring Officer and s151 Officer roles.
How does it work?
Finance
National Parks are financed both by a central government grant and income that they raise themselves from a variety of different sources. Approximately 40% of our annual budget comes direct from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as National Park Grant (NPG). In 2022/23, our gross expenditure will be £11.25 million funded by a DEFRA grant of £4.38 million with the remainder raised from external grant applications, planning income of various types (planning application fees and s106 payments to mitigate the effect of ‘harmful’ development), car park charges and trading activities. In recent years the NPA has actively sought external funding to help deliver priorities and expand what can be achieved. Together with earned income, these can make up over 60% of our budget.
The s151 Officer is a statutory post who is an external person legally responsible for the proper administration of financial affairs. The finance team prepares the budget and regular financial information for managers and members to enable effective budget management, cash flow forecasts, reconcile the bank accounts, pay invoices and salaries and collect income.
IT
The team is vital to the Authority functioning at full capacity – just about everything we do, happens because of our IT systems. Over the last couple of years, we have moved from being office based to a 50:50 split, which means that all our systems need to be sufficiently robust to function as well at home as they do in the office. The use of technology enables us to stay in touch, reduce our travel time, mileage, and carbon emissions.
Supporting our People
Helping all our people perform to their best is the key part of the HR team’s role. They work with managers to deal with recruitment, induction, contracts, terms and conditions of employment, training and development, overseeing all of our apprentice and training programmes and managing health and safety.
Volunteering Team
Volunteering really is part of how we do our work, with volunteers of all ages integrated into roles as diverse as Voluntary Rangers, practical and conservation work parties, survey work, helping us run our gallery, visitor centres and car parks, guided walk leaders, archaeology volunteers and education volunteers. We even have volunteers who manage other volunteers – our Task Day Leaders. Volunteers contribute more than 13,000 days to the National Park each year. Without them we simply wouldn’t be able to do all the great work we do.
Our volunteers get fulfilment from ‘putting something back’, experience physical and mental health benefits, meet like-minded people, finding out more about the National Park and explore areas that they would otherwise not have access to. Wherever we can, volunteers are treated the same as we treat our paid staff.
Committee and Customer Services
The team is the helpful first point of contact for the public via reception and telephone enquiries. They deal with more formal enquiries such complaints and compliments and Freedom of Information/Data Protection requests. The team are responsible for making sure our day-to-day governance runs smoothly in the preparation of formal Committee agenda, minute taking in meetings as well as supporting our Boards Members.
Property
We are in the middle of a major review of our property. Significant projects are being undertaken to reduce carbon emissions at our Visitor Centres. All our Helmsley based property is being sold and a new HQ and Ranger store being planned on another site in the town.