You can listen to Nigel Thompson talk to Gavin Capstick below:
The Lake District is England’s largest national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
This year has certainly seen the area weather its fair share of challenges.
Fly-camping and anti-social behaviour, budget cuts and uncertainty over how much-loved attractions will operate in the future.
Gavin Capstick is coming to the end of his first year as chief executive of the Late District National Park Authority.
In a wide-ranging conversation with Business Crack’s Nigel Thompson he talks about some of the challenges and opportunities he’s faced during his first year in the role.
For those who don’t know what does the Lake District National Park Authority do?
We’re the national park authority, and effectively, we’re a local government organisation, we’re a government body, and we’re tasked with effectively looking after the national park.
What that means in practice is we have two statutory purposes, which were set out in the Environment Act in 1995 but really what it means is national park authorities are set up and we’re here to do two things.
The first is to protect and conserve the natural beauty, the wildlife and the cultural heritage of the Lake District.
And the second is to promote understanding and enjoyment of the national park by locals, by people across the nation and internationally as well.
Statutorily we have few powers. In reality we are the local planning authority. So one thing that is reserved for national park authorities in areas where you have a national park is that planning function, that determining the local plan, ie the vision for what gets built and what development looks like here.
Crucially, the determination of individual applications or putting in for planning permission and getting it determined.
That all sits with a national park authority as opposed to the rest of the country where it would sit with local councils.
But beyond that, we have few statutory functions or regulatory power. Instead, really what we’re tasked to do is to fulfil those purposes of promoting conservation and understanding and enjoyment effectively; we have a soft power, a convening power.
We bring partners together to co-produce, co-develop a vision for the national park, and then try and deliver it.
You’ve been chief exec for nearly a year what have been the highs and maybe the challenges that you’ve faced?
First and foremost, it’s been a brilliant first year!
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the job so far, and that enjoyment is driven by getting out and about and meeting people, meeting people out in the park, whether that’s local residents, communities, whether it’s business owners, whether it’s our brilliant environmental organisations, whether it’s farmers.
The best part of this job is going out and hearing from local people and from visitors and then bringing that knowledge back and trying to shape what we do as an organisation.
We’ve embarked on developing a new management plan.
One of the duties we are given by Government is to develop a management plan and a vision for the park.
So we have to produce a vision and then a plan for delivering that has to be renewed every. For us as a park authority and as a partnership, that’s a pretty big deal.
That’s our document that sets out what we want to do over the long term, but also immediately over the next five years or so.
My appointment a year ago, almost exactly, coincided with that next cycle of development of management plan.
So we’ve spent the first 10 months of this calendar year engaged with partners developing that draft management plan, and we’ll shortly be going out to public consultation on that. So that’s been an exciting time as well.
That must be quite a challenge given the cuts the national park had to make, all while planning for the next five years. How much is your budget now and will it mean now that you’ll have to do less because you’ve got less income?
It’s certainly been a challenging time for us organisationally as a national park authority.
Our budgets have been cut by over 50% in real terms since 2010. So the core funding that funds our services, our day-to-day activity, that’s been halved over the last decade or more. So we’re certainly starting to feel the pinch there in terms of pounds.
The grant funding that we get from Government is about £5 million each year to deliver our services.
We have a gross budget each year that’s typically closer to between £10 and 15 million.
And that’s because alongside the core grant funding that we receive we earn a lot of our own money through fees and charges for services through our more commercial activities such as car parking income, Coniston boating centre, Brockhole etc and were also successful, or we’ve got a good track record at least, in securing grant funding from other sources, whether that’s heritage lottery funding or other governmental departments.
We go out and we seek money from other places, but ultimately the lifeblood of the organisation, the core activity is driven by that National Park Grant, that core grant that comes through Defra and it’s definitely been challenging over the last decade or more, and it was certainly acutely felt when we got about a 9% cut over the last year.
Thankfully it was supplemented by a bit of capital injection, so some money for investment in projects and that’s really, really welcome but it doesn’t underpin that day-to-day activity in the same way that that core grant does.
So what has to give?
All sorts of things have had to give, but first and foremost what I would emphasise is we have become increasingly entrepreneurial as an authority and that’s allowed us to protect services to a good degree.
Not to the extent I would’ve liked to have seen, but to a good degree.
We’ve been able to protect services through income generation in other areas.
All our areas of work have suffered from those government reductions but rather than us seeing total cessation in any given area I think further budget reductions and further pressures would really start to focus us down into what can’t we do anymore and potentially having to stop some services and some activities.
Government are talking to us about a multi-year settlement so three years of at least indicative grant funding.
That would be really welcome because like any organisation, we crave a bit of certainty so we can plan over the medium term and plan what our priorities are going to be.
What is the future of the Brockhole visitor centre?
I’m a father of three and my girls are eight, 10, and 12 and we’ve spent a good part of the last decade outside of my working hours at Brockhole.
It really is a special place and the question is timely. I spent yesterday morning on site at Brockhole thanking the staff and this is a great opportunity to do so more publicly.
They’ve always done a wonderful job and they’ve done a really good job, I think, across the course of this season in quite difficult circumstances.
We’ve made some changes in terms of the way they operate the site. We were forced to do so from a cost control point of view at the start of the year and that’s been really difficult for the staff on the ground.
What hasn’t wavered for one second is their commitment to looking after the public, to creating a really special environment and providing a wonderful experience for kids and families.
The site was put out in terms of a long leasehold for a third party operator to come in and operate it.
There were some clear controls on there that it would have to remain a visitor centre with public access. The intent of that leasehold is still that there’ll be public access and people can go and enjoy those grounds and get access to the lake.
We’ve narrowed it down to a couple of options and we’re just in a process now that both those bids that have come in we need a little bit more commercial clarification and what the offer will be that will be commercially viable to the potential operator and palatable to us as a national park authority.
We’re in final discussions and will make those final decisions over the coming months effectively.
Do you still feel a sense of regret that you were forced to make this decision about Brockhole?
Absolutely. We did build up reserves and the reason that we took some pretty significant decisions in terms of whether we are the right organisation to directly operate Brockhole because we had built up reserves and then saw them depleted.
It’s been a high-cost service for us to maintain and when you set a budget, if you then have a difficult summer, it depletes those reserves.
Those financial drivers have been critical in us reaching the decision that we did in December last year.
I would like nothing more to have two, three, or four Brockholes dotted around the national park for us to be in a position to really engage right across the park.
But like any organisation we have to live within our means and we have to have focus our service areas on the things that we’re statutorily responsible for.
There have been well publicised cases of anti-social behaviour over the summer including an ‘epidemic’ of littering according to the Friends of the Lake District. Does it just come down to education?
We’ve certainly got a role to play and putting out messages around responsible behaviour is something we actively do.
We’ve had public campaigns such as Love the Lake District as an example and we work in partnership to try and get those messages out as well.
We’ve also got a role to play in terms of regrettably getting out there and clearing up because I think however effective we are with the message there will still be a hardcore group of people who perhaps don’t behave in the way that we would hope to.
It’s certainly something I wish that we weren’t doing as there’s more productive things that as a park authority our ranger service and our visitor management officers can be doing with their time.
How much has this cost the LDNPA?
I couldn’t put a pound shilling and pence figure on it here and now, but I know that we’ve certainly had to divert our rangers whose core duty is not getting out there and clearing up after visitors.
Their core duties are around maintaining and looking after the crucial rights of way network, the footpaths and the bridle ways as well as nature recovery work and also liaising with local communities.
We’ve diverted for them from those core duties and they’ve been out on multi-agency patrols, on litter picks at the weekends, and although again I couldn’t put a direct figure on it, we will have also budgeted in the region of £85,000 to £90,000 for three specialist roles over the last year or two that have been out trying to engage with visitors and crucially clearing up after that hardcore minority that have dropped litter or have been fly-camping.
We’ve got a role to play and we need to reflect with our partners on how we push those messages more effectively.
But I think there’s also a conversation to be had at a national level about how something akin to a modern take on the countryside code is embedded in the national curriculum.
We’ve also led a little bit of work engaging with social media influencers to try and shape the messaging that other people are putting out.
This is not an issue and a problem that is limited to the Lake District and it is not a problem and an issue that’s limited to national parks.
We’re seeing this in open countryside and beauty spots right across the country.
I think increased enforcement activity has to play a role as well and we really welcome the involvement of the police and crime commissioner.
We’ve responded to the consultations around public space protection orders and would like to see them in place and the wording of them beefed up to really address the issue.
I regret that that’s required but I think it will have to be part of the solution.
The use of social media influencers commissioned by the LDNPA has received criticism from some. What difference have they made?
Whether we like it or not, there’s no way of controlling that in the 21st century and where we are with social media.
I think it’s undeniable that it’s had an impact in terms of not necessarily visitor numbers, but the demographics of visitors, the way that they interact with the landscape, the way that they visit places like the Lake District.
You’re left with a choice; you can either ignore it and let them do their own thing or you can get involved and engage to try and shape those behaviours and shape the messaging that’s going out. That’s what we’ve chosen to do.
I think that’s much more productive than leaving things to take their own course and not trying to intervene, not trying to push more positive messages.
I think there’s also a benefit to working with those influencers because in terms of their reach, their audience is very different to the people that are following the LDNPA’s channels on Facebook, on X or Instagram.
And if we want to reach the widest audience and the demographics to make sure that we address these issues we’ve got to be using the channels that will reach them.
Is Cumbria too popular?
No, I don’t think that the fundamental problem is the visitor numbers. The most reliable data we’ve got around this is that visitor numbers haven’t returned to the sort of levels that we saw pre-Covid, neither day visitors nor overnight stays.
I think where the pressure comes isn’t the sheer volume of visitors, I think it’s much more to do with the nature of the visitors a change in demographics, a change in visitor behaviours, and a change in the places that they’re visiting and the way that they behave when they get there.
The demographics are quite clear that we’ve got a younger audience, post-Covid, a much more active audience.
They want to be away from the town centres or Bowness or Ambleside but want to be next to the water. They want to be up on the fells. So I think it’s more a shift in visitors and a shift in visitor behaviour.
We still have to look at the messaging that we get out there and we’re going to have to look at the way that we take enforcement action to regulate behaviour as well.
So how would you do that given that you’ve got fewer troops on the ground because of budget cuts?
In respect of enforcement activity I think that’s a conversation we have to have across this winter and that we have already started. It’s positive to see the sort of early signs of commitment from key agencies around this. Again, we really welcome the police and crime commissioners’ involvement in this.
And it may be that for a limited number of time, we all have to put some resources in but particularly those organisations with enforcement powers have to make a commitment from this.
Part of it is doing that in a limited number of cases but making sure that the wider public are aware of that, getting that message out that actually this type of behaviour isn’t acceptable within the national park and that there will be consequences to it.
It then leaves much more space for the vast majority of our visitors who are brilliant. They come, they enjoy their national park, they support our local economy they have no impact and no burden on local communities or no negative impacts in that way. It can let them get on, enjoying their national park and let our residents get in on and enjoying their local area as well.
Is the national park’s partnership open and accountable?
If we chose to simply prepare the management plan for the national park as a standalone authority, which we could do, we could certainly draft a plan.
But our ability to crack on and deliver it would be extremely limited!
So I think forming a partnership with bodies that do have statutory powers, budgets, control land holdings is certainly the route to go.
And we’re a bit of a pioneer here in the late district and you’re actually seeing that approach adopted by a lot of other national parks around the country now in recognition of the brilliant convening power that a national park authority has but the limited direct control that we have as organisations.
But there is a real important nuance here that although the partnership plan is developed by the partnership and delivered by the partnership, it remains the statutory management plan and statutory document for the park authority.
So we consult on that plan as a park authority and we will do so publicly and openly and you’ll see calls for that across our social media channels in the coming months.
We also take the decision to approve that plan as an authority in a public meeting so the public can come along, they can see the minutes of that meeting, they can see the discussion on our website. All our committee meetings and our authority meetings are live streamed and can be seen on our YouTube channel.
So not only the adoption and the content is all out there and decided in the public domain, the update and the progress reporting on it is done through the authorities committee process as well.
Yet the partnership itself, the actual meetings themselves, are not public or open to the media. Shouldn’t people have the same opportunity as you and your colleagues to witness this?
I think the way I would describe it is it is an iterative process.
The bit that the partnership are engaged in at the early developmental stages of that plan, we then have a full consultation plan that isn’t a question of here’s a document and we’re about to set out and improve, irrespective of input from the public, from other stakeholders.
It’s a genuine consultation process and that window’s quite broad and quite open, and as I say, that is public.
When it concludes, that management plan then comes back to the authority to adopt. That whole adoption process, despite being developed in partnership in private, and I stand by that, there’s some pretty fraught and difficult discussions you can imagine.
I think it is important that if we’re really going to have a meaningful plan, the space that the early iterations of it can be developed with some really frank open and challenging conversations.
And it’s more difficult to do that, if I’m honest, in full public glare. That doesn’t mean that the development of the plan and that public consultation doesn’t happen.
With full transparency, it really does because ultimately, it’s the park authority as a public body that has to go through an approval process and has to publish the plan, and that consultation period that I keep referring to is genuinely open and meaningful.
Does the sheer number of support groups, charities and voluntary groups that exist in the Lake District mean you can’t please everybody?
We acknowledge that there will always be a degree of frustration or disappointment that we haven’t, followed specific agendas to the extent that influence and lobby groups or special interest groups would like.
The point of the partnership and the aim of the authority itself ultimately is to try and balance the competing demands on our national park.
That’s our job; to try and seek a balance on what can at times be conflicting views.
Where I take comfort is from when you get stakeholders together in a room, there’s more that unites them in a lot of areas than divides them.
And what they tend to share is an absolute passion to see the Lake District thrive and to see it be the best place it can for, for visitors, residents, businesses, for all the stakeholders that have an interest.
Looking forward to next year what would you like to have achieved in 12 months time?
Firstly I’d want to see that management plan adopted and to get the broadest consensus we can around the direction of travel and a vision for the Lake District. I think that’s really, really important.
We will then be launching the next linked stage as well of the process which is our local plan, the core function of the authority.
And I think crucially also listening to communities and residents’ concerns. I think as agencies going into a new visitor season with a clearer sense of how we’re going to support communities in terms of dealing with those particular pressures around littering, fly camping and more.
I think that’s important to address over the next six months.
