Women left out in the cold in the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority

July 6, 2021

By Bill Heaney

The Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority has an “overwhelming preponderance of men on the LLTNPA Board and the senior mnagement team,” according to one of its sternest critics, Nick Kempe of Parkswatch Scotland.

And he has called on the the new Scottish Minister responsible for National Parks, Mairi McAllan, pictured right,  step in and rectify matters.

He wrote in the Parkswatch journal this week: “The facts are that men hold all the top management positions in the LLTNPA (Chief Executive and the Directors of Corporate Service, Rural Development and Conservation) and all the senior positions on the Board (Convener, Vice Convener, conveners of the Planning and Audit Committee).  Just four out of seventeen LLTNPA Board Members are women. “

Nick Kempe added that while board reports claim that “we have worked hard to promote diversity and inclusion of our people andgovernance,”  there is no analysis of what difference this has made or comparison of how the LLTNPA is doing compared to other public authorities.

He gave this analysis of “the male dominated board” – “While there are now more women Board Members than there were a couple of years ago, back in 2014-15 (see here) there were also four women on the Board.

“But the difference then was that one of them, Linda McKay, was Convener of the Board and another, Petra Biberbach, was Convener of the Planning Committee.  Currently women now have far less influence and power on the LLTNPA Board than they once had. 

“By comparison, while the senior management team in the Cairngorms National Park Authority is similarly male dominated, their Board comprises 10 women and nine men and both the vice-Convener of the Board and the Convener of the Planning Committee are women.

“There was no mention of this … public authorities are supposed to compare how they are doing compared to other organisations – or in the Board discussion.

“Instead the Equalities Report tries to gloss over and excuse the highly unequal representation of men on the LLTNPA Board: “Our Board is made up of three times as many men as women. However, of the six Board members appointed directly by Ministers, three are women and three are men. The remaining ten Board members are directly elected or nominated by local authorities, and we currently have oneBoard vacancy”.

The implication is that the Scottish Government is doing their bit, but there is nothing anyone can do about nominations from local authorities or the five directly elected members of the Board who are all men.  This is not true. 

“It is the Scottish Government who decides whether or not to accept the six people nominated by local authorities.  It could insist, for example, that those local authorities nominating two members (Argyll and Bute and Stirling) put forward one male councillor and one female councillor.

“It is also the case that the Scottish Government could increase the number of women appointed by Ministers as they have done in the Cairngorms National Park where five ministerial appointees are women.”

Nick Kempe, pictured right, suggested that the LLTNPA could, of course, have been lobbying the Scottish Government to use their influence and powers to increase the numbers of women on the Board -“But they have chosen not to do so.

He said: “They could  have taken the opportunity to consider the blatantly unfair first past the post system for electing local members to the National Park Board (see here) and (here) and whether changes to the electoral system might might create diversity.

“They could also have decided to take encourage more people to stand for the Board, as the Cairngorms National Park Authority has done (see here).  While these are not simple issues to address, as has been shown in the Cairngorms (see here), a public authority worth the name would be trying to address them.

“However, not a single LLTNPA Board Member attempted to question the adequacy of the report or raise these issues and there was no debate about how to diversify the composition of the Board.

“A reasonable conclusion is that this was because it is not in the interests of the current incumbents to do so.

“Perhaps all the men  who benefit from the current system should have declared an interest at the meeting and left before the discussion took place?  Now that would have been interesting.”

Mr Kempe says a similar position exists with the senior management team – “Six years ago women made up almost half of all senior managers at Loch Lomond. Now, its men who run the show:

“The Equalities report, however, avoids any analysis of the changes of the top.  As required by law it analyses the gender pay gap:

“However, by considering the median pay gap first (see here for explanation) it makes the position of women appear far better than it is.  It’s the average pay gap that matters and what is very clear is that women in the LLTNPA are, on average, paid significantly less than men.  (That situation is replicated on the Board where the conveners of the committees, who are all men, collect far more fees than other Board members).

“The Board report also  contains, as legally required, a brief section on occupational segregation.  This conceals what is really going on by failing to report the exact number of male and female staff:  By using <5  the report conceals the number of men and women at different levels of the organisation.  There is no justification for this and it is quite ridiculous to report there is <5 of a CEO.

“Pointing out that the executive support team are all women provides only half the picture.  These women, including those who did the leg-work on the Equalities report, are all serving what is effectively an all male senior management team. 

“The one woman who I understand is on the senior management team is employed on a lower grade (F).  In the best paid team in the National Park, Planning and Rural Development, while women make up the bulk of the workforce, men and far more likely to fill management positions.

There was not a single critical question raised about this at the Board Meeting.

Gordon Watson, Chief Executive of Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority.

What needs to happen, according to Mr Kempe is this: “Since Gordon Watson was appointed Chief Executive and James Stuart was elected as Convener, gender equality among the most senior positions in the National Park has got worse, not better.

“My suspicion is that if the LLTNPA analysed what progress it had made since it was created almost 20 years ago there would be none.  This makes all the fine words in the Equalities Report about striving for change effectively meaningless. Every four years the LLTNPA repeats the same mantra, which is that  this time it really is going to try harder.

“Indeed, in terms of the wider content of the report – which provides anecdotes about what the LLTNPA is trying to do to increase the diversity of people visiting the National Park – it is not clear there has been any progress since 2009 when SNH produced a report on barriers to access in our National Parks (see here).”

He added: “While in my view there is little evidence to show that the LLTNPA performed any better when more women filled powerful positions, given both the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government’s commitment to promoting gender equality, one might have expected both the Board papers and the discussion to contain some critical discussion of the failure of the LLTNPA to tackle gender equality.  There was none.

“The message to the new Scottish Minister responsible for National Parks, Mairi McAllan, is that the LLTNPA will never sort this out under their current Board and senior management team and the reason for this is its contrary to their personal interests.

“The question now is whether Mairi McAllan will be brave enough to step in and use her ministerial powers to get a new type of person onto the Board who sees their role as being more than rubber stamping whatever the senior management team present to them.”

A Park Authority spokesperson said they were satified that they were making progress on equality matters and details of what they were doing were contained within the report for their last meeting about it.