Social Enterprise Plan the Storr, Staffin
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Social Enterprise Plan The Storr, Staffin Hazel Allen Athena Solutions 21 Urquhart Road, Dingwall IV15 9PE t. 07824 510647 e. [email protected] Social Enterprise Plan The Storr, Staffin Contents 1. Executive Summary ............................................................................................................................... 1 2. Vision, Aims, and Outcomes –what are the Trust trying to achieve? ................................................... 3 3. Community Stakeholders and their Needs ........................................................................................... 5 3.1. Staffin and its Community............................................................................................................. 5 3.2. Community consultation findings ................................................................................................. 6 4. Institutional Stakeholders ..................................................................................................................... 7 4.1. Scottish Government .................................................................................................................... 7 4.2. Highland Council ........................................................................................................................... 7 4.3. Scottish Natural Heritage .............................................................................................................. 9 4.4. Highlands and Islands Enterprise .................................................................................................. 9 4.5. Scottish Land Fund ........................................................................................................................ 9 5. Customers and their needs ................................................................................................................. 10 6. What activities meet Community, Stakeholder & Customer needs? ................................................. 11 7. What resources do we need to deliver those activities – Assets, funding, skills? .............................. 12 7.1. Assets .......................................................................................................................................... 12 7.2. Purchase and Development Costs .............................................................................................. 15 7.3. Funding ....................................................................................................................................... 16 7.4. Skills............................................................................................................................................. 17 8. What income / surpluses can we generate?....................................................................................... 18 8.1. Income and expenditure ............................................................................................................. 18 8.2. Sensitivity Analysis – income ...................................................................................................... 19 8.3. Impact of financing costs ............................................................................................................ 20 9. What are the risks? ............................................................................................................................. 21 List of Figures Figure 1: Allocation of £979,100 development costs ............................................................................... 2 Figure 2: Outputs and Measures ............................................................................................................... 4 Figure 3: Percentage age ranges of population, Staffin and Scotland ...................................................... 5 Figure 4: SIMD ranking for Storr ............................................................................................................... 5 Figure 5: Map of the Storr area ............................................................................................................... 11 Figure 6: Plans for the Arrival Site and Key Features .............................................................................. 14 Figure 7: Development costs .................................................................................................................. 15 Figure 8: Funding sought ......................................................................................................................... 16 Figure 9: Seasonal visitor number assumptions ..................................................................................... 18 Figure 10: Staffing assumptions – hours per day .................................................................................... 18 Figure 11: Summary 5-year income and expenditure ............................................................................ 19 Figure 12: Annual Cash Flow ................................................................................................................... 20 Figure 13: Summary of Key Risks ............................................................................................................ 21 Appendices Appendix 1: Extract from Audience Profile Report ..................................................................................... 22 Appendix 2: Options Appraisal Summary ................................................................................................... 24 Appendix 3 Detailed 5 Year Income and Expenditure ................................................................................ 25 Appendix 4 Risk Register ............................................................................................................................. 26 Appendix 5 Skills Audit ................................................................................................................................ 28 Appendix 6 Local Press Articles on the Storr Site: West Highland Free Press ............................................ 30 Appendix 7 Extract from Paper Item 6, 2 November 2016, HC Planning and Infrastructure Committee .. 31 Social Enterprise Plan The Storr, Staffin 1. Executive Summary The Staffin Community Trust (Urras an Taobh Sear) (“the Trust”) is determined to unlock the economic potential of its community, a remote and economically fragile scattered community in the north-east of Skye. The Trust has a track record stretching back more than 20 years of building community capacity and infrastructure, including the Staffin Slipway project and, more recently, securing significant investment in visitor amenities including the Ceumannan II or “Ecomuseum” project. While these projects have helped bring welcome visitors to Staffin and encouraged them to stay longer, the infrastructure was not built for the amount of traffic and increasing number of visitors which the district now attracts. The project site at the Storr sees well over 100,000 tourists per year visiting the internationally- famous Old Man of Storr. These people mainly travel by car but they also use tourist buses and public transport. The site, and particularly the arrival zone, where the car park is situated, does not have enough capacity for this number of visitors. The Highland Council, the current owner, has increased parking at the site by providing a tarred layby at the side of the road. This investment was welcomed but is often at over capacity with vehicles and the opposite grass verge, and other side of the main A855 road, has become an unofficial overspill car park. Road safety concerns have frequently been raised by local residents due to the lack of parking spaces, the number of people alighting from cars onto a busy main road and absence of warning signs. Public sanitation concerns have also been by raised by the Staffin community, due to the lack of public toilets, in a major consultation carried out by the Trust in November 2015. The Trust regards this site as a key “gateway” to Staffin, with approximately 70 per cent of visitors to the Storr travelling on to the local community and other scenic sites. The Trust wishes to acquire the site to help meet its outcomes: Increase the economic and social benefit of the site to the community; Improve the visitor experience to the Staffin site; Improve the site’s natural environment; and Integrate the interpretation of cultural heritage at the site with the wider Ceumannan project. The Trust has carried out consultation with its community and stakeholders to consider what parts of the Storr site it should acquire, and how this helps to deliver its vision. It commissioned an Options Appraisal which concluded that only the arrival zone of the site, where the car park is, could deliver on the economic and social benefit outcomes. Other parts of the site would not help deliver economic outcomes and could provide both an economic and regulatory burden on the Trust. Research carried out by the Trust into visitors to Staffin and to the Storr site identified four groups; Independent travellers, who are were either causal walkers or families; Organised groups: backpackers, private coach tours, Columba clients and Gaelic students were less likely to visit the Storr currently as there is little cultural heritage interpretation at this site; Nature/heritage enthusiasts who tended to visit Staffin’s coastal sites in search of geological heritage; The Staffin/wider Skye community, who use the