Annual report 2013/14
2013/14 was a strong year for the National Trust. There were almost 20 million visits to our pay-for-entry properties, 5% up on 2012/13, and surveys show our visitors found their visits more enjoyable. We met demanding financial targets and continued our programme of capital investment which will reduce the backlog of our conservation work, core to our historic mission.
Part of our success in 2013/14 was attributable to extended opening. Many properties now open 363 days a year. More will do so in future. Properties are also better at programming events such as the Frost Fair at Attingham Park in Shropshire. Generally there is something happening at properties all year round.
Highlights of 2013/14 included the purchase of Fingle Woods in Devon in partnership with the Woodland Trust, which will be restored and made accessible to the public for the first time. At the Holnicote Estate in Somerset a project started looking at how we can achieve a sustainable approach to flood management.
Cliveden in Buckinghamshire welcomed 70,000 more visitors, many of whom enjoyed the temporary instalment of a seven-metre slide on the South Terrace, a great attraction for all ages. Our opening of the Big Brother house for a weekend proved admirably controversial, but helped communicate our existence and work to a wider audience.
We were not successful on all fronts. We missed our energy reduction targets. We will look at how to improve our performance.
The end of 2013/14 will be remembered for storms and flooding. For years the Trust has pointed to the dangers of over-development and inappropriate farming, especially of uplands and catchment areas. We need to work in harmony with nature in responding to changes in weather.
We have continued to speak out on changes to planning laws and guidance. Our countryside and green belt is under sustained threat from inappropriate and ill-conceived development. We have engaged with Government on this, be it about planning in general or specific proposals such as High Speed 2. We regard the destruction of our landscape and biodiversity as the main conservation threat facing these islands.
2014 is my last year as Chairman. I have enjoyed, learned from, and been honoured to hold this office. I have visited properties all over the country and can testify to the Trust’s range and commitment. It has been a humbling experience. I would like to thank staff, volunteers, donors, members and other supporters for all they do. I remain aware of tough times ahead, both competition from other visitor attractions and threats to the landscape from unsympathetic development. They leave me more convinced than ever of the importance of the National Trust to British society, and equally sure that the Trust is in good shape to live up to that importance.
Simon Jenkins
Chairman
16 July 2014
My first full year as Director-General has been enjoyable and inspiring. With my team I held discussions with the Board about our future direction and started much-needed work to improve how we communicate with our members, simplify our internal systems and improve the condition of our estate. Most importantly I saw at first hand the commitment of staff, volunteers, donors and visitors to the wonderful places in our care. Growing the nation’s love of those special places is at the heart of what we do. It was a wonderful year.
I took the helm of a successful organisation, success which continued in 2013/14 despite the terrible winter weather. My thanks go to everyone who made it so, particularly the unsung heroes among our staff and volunteers who did so much in the wet and stormy months.
As I’ve been out and about this year, talking to staff, volunteers and supporters, I have emphasised that the Trust’s purpose is a virtuous circle – we look after special places, supporters benefit from that and their support allows us to keep on looking after places. It’s simple but works. With this in mind, the key was to identify our priorities.
Every year we do more to look after special places. In 2013/14 we continued our programme of investment in capital works. Among others these included multi-million pound investments at Knole in Kent and Castle Drogo in Devon. As importantly the Board agreed a programme of major investment in our let estate, our 5,000-plus tenanted properties. All these investments reflect a determination to deliver excellent property stewardship, providing leadership in the areas for which we are rightly known.
We also began a programme of major investments in our internal systems. We are bringing our processes into the twenty-first century with projects that will improve our membership systems and digital communications, our tills and our finance systems. Together these represent significant change for staff and volunteers but a change which will improve the service we provide. The Board was closely involved in developing the business cases and implementation plans. I am grateful for Trustees’ support.
We began a debate in 2013/14 about our future direction. There is an abundance of evidence to demonstrate that land and biodiversity should be major conservation priorities. I am also clear that we need to present and explain our historic buildings in a way that engages visitors of all kinds, and reinforces the importance of their history in the lives we live today. We are defining our ambitions in these areas which will form a cornerstone of our future strategy, one which will be defined clearly in 2014/15.
The National Trust ended 2013/14 in a position of strength. I reiterate my thanks to everyone who helped make this so. Beyond this success the year demonstrated that the nation’s conservation challenges and the need for leadership continue to grow. The National Trust is rising to those challenges as it has done for over 115 years.
Dame Helen Ghosh
Director-General
16 July 2014
Our Annual Report describes our performance over the past year across a wide range of activities. It reflects the breadth of the National Trust’s interests from the care of great estates, countryside, coastline and thousands of tenanted properties and farms, to our role in demonstrating good property stewardship and influencing policy-makers. It also reports on how we have performed in growing our membership and in providing our visitors with an enjoyable day out.
We have identified and explained some of the main challenges and successes of the past 12 months. These are set out in the Highlights of the year section.
Despite the very wet weather at the end of the year, we are pleased to report that we met our key financial targets. We achieved a 10.1% Net Gain, equivalent to £31.4 million and a £7.5 million improvement on last year. We also spent £62.6 million on conservation projects, up £10.8 million on 2012/13. Membership and visitor numbers increased as did visitors’ enjoyment while visiting our properties. On the down side the wet weather particularly affected some of our residential and tenant farmers and we should acknowledge the difficulties they experienced. It also made a significant impact on our coastline, particularly in the South West and in Norfolk.
The Board and the Executive Team continue to review the longer-term strategy of the Trust to ensure we are putting our effort and resources to best use. The Trust has always had to respond to changing conservation challenges, and over the next 12 months we will be looking again at some of the big issues we face and their implications for our plans.
The Executive Team’s plans to update some of our most important information systems, referred to by the Director-General, are most welcome. Many of our old systems are no longer fit for purpose yet are hugely important in enabling our staff to run the Trust effectively and provide our members with the information and service they expect. We will be making significant investment in this area over the next few years. We have also reviewed and agreed with the Executive Team an accelerated investment plan for the next three years to ensure we deliver our conservation and estate management objectives. This has been approved in the context of careful scrutiny of our long-term financial plans and obligations.
The National Trust ends the year in good shape. None of this would have been possible without the magnificent support of our donors, members and other supporters and the wonderful work of our staff and tens of thousands of volunteers. We thank you all.
The case studies below provide a snapshot of some of our work in 2013/14 and the impact this has had on improving conservation and access. The weather made the last months of the year particularly challenging but also provided an opportunity to reinforce our messages about the need to work with nature.
Castle Drogo is a country house in Devon. The twentieth-century castle was designed by Edwin Lutyens for Julius Drewe and was the last castle in Britain to be made entirely of granite. In 1974 the Drewe family donated Castle Drogo to the National Trust with 243 hectares of the surrounding estate. In winter 2012, a major conservation project began to make Castle Drogo watertight for the first time in its history. The flat roofs had originally been covered with asphalt, but for over 80 years leakage had led to extensive water damage. The windows also leaked and the walls needed to be repointed. Without remedial work, the castle would have been uninhabitable within ten years. The conservation work required was on a large scale and repairing a roof as large as two football pitches required the construction of a complex scaffolding system and temporary roofed enclosure.
Castle Drogo remains open during conservation work, with a scaffold viewing platform giving visitors a chance to view the conservation at first hand. Inside the building, rooms to the south have been emptied of objects in preparation for the restoration, allowing new exhibitions to be set up. These include a replica of Castle Drogo built from tea chests, as well as other installations looking at the way the Drewe family lived, how the castle was built and the impact of the First World War on construction, using a collection of letters and drawings from the castle archive which are scattered throughout the castle. The project has been made possible thanks to support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Wolfson Foundation, the Country Houses Foundation, the Headley Trust and a public appeal supported by thousands of individuals.
In August 2013 the National Trust joined forces with the Woodland Trust to purchase and restore Fingle Woods which span the River Teign in Devon. Over £3 million was raised this year through a joint fundraising campaign. The National Trust will take care of 61.4 hectares of the 334-hectare wood on the edge of Dartmoor, situated between two National Trust properties – Castle Drogo and Steps Bridge Woods. The National Trust, in partnership with the Woodland Trust, aims to improve public access to this beautiful part of Dartmoor that has not previously been accessible to the public. Fundraising towards this will continue in 2014/15.
Ancient woodlands such as Fingle Woods are valuable habitats for many species of birds, insects, animals and plants. The conservation value of the woodland will be greatly enhanced by clearing conifers to let the native species regenerate. Some 27 miles of footpath will be created through the woods, giving visitors the opportunity to see long-forgotten sights, including an Iron Age hill fort at Wooston Castle and the Hidden Valley at Halls Cleave. It will also provide the chance to encounter huge wood-ant nests, watch for birds of prey, including buzzards and sparrowhawks, and spy on kingfishers and otters at the Weir Pool on the River Teign.
Hafod y Llan is a historically important farm on the flanks of Snowdon farmed in hand by the National Trust. The wider estate is a National Nature Reserve, home to Welsh mountain sheep, Welsh black cattle, feral goats and rare plant species. A large hydro-electric turbine has been under construction at Hafod y Llan for many months – the National Trust’s first large-scale renewable energy scheme. The hydro-electric turbine will capture half a tonne of water per second and will generate approximately 1,900MWhr per year. This is more than enough electricity to light up the eight mansions, three castles and 45 holiday cottages that the Trust looks after in Wales.
A new company, ‘The National Trust (Renewable Energy) Limited’, was established in order to sell the energy to our partners, Good Energy Limited. Money raised from this project will be used to fund conservation projects. This project is a large step towards fulfilling the Trust’s renewable energy plans, to provide clean energy to 43 of its properties and to create sustainable energy solutions that work in harmony with the environment. The hydro-electric turbine was officially switched on in April 2014.
The High Peak Moors cover some 10,000 hectares of moorland around Kinder, Bleaklow and Upper Derwent in the Peak District. In September 2013 the Trust launched the High Peak Moors Vision and Plan, a 50-year project to enhance and restore landscape and wildlife habitats and provide a wide range of public benefits. These include continued access, engagement with nature, better water quality and improved carbon capture and storage in soils. In 2013 the Trust continued its work of planting cotton grass and blocking gullies to stabilise bare and eroding peat. Work will continue to reintroduce trees and shrubs, manage grazing, re-wet peat bogs and encourage diverse wildlife.
The Holnicote Estate in Somerset consists of nearly 5,000 hectares of Exmoor National Park. It is a diverse landscape made up of wild moorland, shingle beaches, ancient woodland, rivers, saltmarsh and villages. A multi-objective flood management project is underway at Holnicote, supported by Defra and the Environment Agency and managed by the National Trust. The project aims to demonstrate that, by working at the catchment scale and changing some land management practices, a sustainable approach to flood management can be achieved while producing wider environmental and community benefits.
Results have shown that approaches to retain and slow down water upstream can both protect communities downstream and provide opportunities for creating new and improved habitats for many species. By holding water at strategic locations so that it was released slowly after intense and prolonged periods of rain in 2013/14, flooding was prevented in the nearby villages of Allerford and Bossington. Findings are being shared with partners and other organisations at a national level.
Leith Hill Place is an elegant seventeenth-century house and estate in Surrey which has been home to several influential families. The house was owned by the Wedgwood family, whose famous members included the potter Josiah Wedgwood. It was visited regularly by their relative Charles Darwin who conducted research and experiments in the gardens. Composer Ralph Vaughan Williams lived in the house in the late nineteenth-century. He gave the property to the Trust in 1945.
Leith Hill Place opened to the public for the first time in July 2013. Interpretation inside the house is minimal, giving the property a relaxed and informal atmosphere, and a ‘soundscape’ has been installed in the attic rooms. Part audio-guide and part art installation, the soundscape is a shared experience where groups of visitors are guided through a series of rooms, listening to narration, contemporary letters and music by Vaughan Williams and others. The property is a work in progress, and visitors were given the chance to see the house in transition and share their views on the future presentation.
Llyndy Isaf is a 248-hectare in-hand farm in the Nant Gwynant valley in the heart of Snowdonia. The upland farm features in Welsh mythology – the hill Dinas Emrys on the estate is said to be the site of an epic battle between a white dragon and a red dragon (now the national emblem of Wales). In 2011 the Trust launched a successful appeal to purchase Llyndy Isaf and the surrounding area to preserve it for future generations.
In 2013/14, with the support of the Wales Federation of Young Farmers Clubs (YFC), the Trust offered a scholarship allowing one young person the opportunity to manage Llyndy Isaf for a year. Farmer Caryl Hughes, 23, and her sheepdog Mist, won the scholarship at the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show in July 2013. Caryl will manage Llyndy Isaf for one year as part of the wider in-hand farmed estate, developing her skills in stock management, business and practical farm management.
The National Trust’s Natural Childhood report, published in 2012, highlighted the increasing disconnection between children and nature in the UK. As part of the response to this problem the Trust helped launch an initiative called The Wild Network. This is a movement of over 1,500 organisations and 6,000 individuals from across the conservation, play, health and education sectors. It champions connection with nature and wildness in children and young people. The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation has supported the development of the accompanying campaign.
In October 2013 the Trust supported the release of Project Wild Thing – a feature-length documentary, which took a light-hearted but revealing look at the problem of children’s diminishing connection with nature. The Trust’s successful 50 things to do before you’re 11¾ campaign, a list of the best outdoor adventures for children, first launched in 2012, was run again in 2013.
On the first anniversary of the National Planning Policy Framework in March 2013 we highlighted the many areas that did not have a local plan in place, which made it harder for communities to influence development in their area. We published further research in December 2013 which showed that over half the local authorities in England with green-belt land were preparing to allocate some of it for development whilst brownfield sites were overlooked. We continue to monitor how the National Planning Policy Framework is working in practice and the development of the National Planning Policy Guidance.
The changes to the planning system have been part of a wider agenda to stimulate the economy through investing in new energy, housing and transport infrastructure. These types of infrastructure affect National Trust properties. We continue to work with central and local government and the private sector to try and manage these impacts, from High Speed 2 to offshore wind to proposals for new roads.
Our countryside is affected by planning and infrastructure but also by the way public funding influences the management of land, particularly through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In 2013/14 we worked hard to influence the CAP settlement for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, particularly to ensure CAP provides public benefit by moving funding from direct subsidies towards projects that deliver more sustainable farming practices which will enhance our countryside and help restore nature.
The National Trust, English Heritage and East Northamptonshire Council worked together to oppose the siting of wind turbines close to Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire. We believed that the turbines would have had a substantial negative impact on the setting and significance of these heritage assets and decided that it was important for us to go to Court to fight to preserve the setting of this important historic place. We were delighted that the Court of Appeal upheld the previous decision of the High Court to quash a Planning Inspector’s approval of this development.
Throughout the year, the London Project – our experimental effort to reach younger and metropolitan audiences in the capital – continued to surprise, sometimes delight and occasionally outrage. In total over 60 events large and small were staged, ranging from theatrical dining at our properties to film shows, beer festivals, garden games, singles nights and tours on our own Routemaster bus, following in the steps of John Betjeman.
Through partnerships ranging from 10 Downing St (Open Garden Squares Weekend) to Somerset House (our Stanley Spencer show attracting nearly 80,000 visitors in eight weeks), to ‘Octavia’s Orchard’ (now installed in a south London housing estate), the London Project reached over 200,000 people through branded events. A further 25,000 members took advantage of our National Trust Partner scheme with currently 14 small independent museum participants. And the media hubbub over the opening of the infamous Big Brother house for a weekend, according to independent estimates, reached 79 per cent of all UK adults an average of 12 times each.
Our work in 2013/14 was rooted in our current strategy. This focuses on four areas: engaging our supporters, improving conservation and environmental performance, investing in our people, and financing our future. Success was measured by a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which are shown in the diagram on the adjacent page.
In 2013/14 our priorities were visitor enjoyment and volunteer recommendation. We continued to invest in them as they are key to building public engagement and supporting conservation.
We also prioritised investment in our residential let estate and in reducing our energy use and investing in our renewable energy scheme.
The year’s performance results are shown in the table below. The following pages provide an overview of our performance against those targets. During 2014/15 we will continue reviewing our current strategy. We will say more about this in next year’s report.
Alongside the indicators, we continue to deliver our programmes across the Trust:
These programmes are embedded in all our work. Examples of the activities that form part of these programmes are given in our Highlights of the year section.
We could not do our work without the millions of supporters who help us by joining as members, donating and volunteering because they love special places as much as we do. In 2013/14 we worked hard to improve the experience we offer visitors, to help our staff to manage our volunteers well and to recruit and retain more members and donors. We also did more to communicate what we stand for, to help people to understand and engage with our cause.
We focused again on improving visitor enjoyment by investing in the basics of a good visitor experience. Overall, we had 19.9 million visits to our pay-for-entry properties and the percentage of visitors describing their visit as ‘very enjoyable’ went up from 62% to 66%, exceeding our target of 65%. Our combined score for ‘enjoyable’ and ‘very enjoyable’ visits remained consistently high at over 97%. Our property teams worked very hard to achieve these results and we are delighted their efforts are recognised by our visitors. Over 90,000 visits were recorded in our survey, including visits to over 50 outdoor properties. We will not rest on our laurels. We will continue to invest in our service promise, the facilities we provide, our ‘spirit of place’ training and interpretation. Our properties are continuing to develop innovative new ways of bringing their stories to life and from 2014 many will mark the centenary of the First World War. These include the ‘Sanctuary from the Trenches’ project, the transformation of Dunham Massey into the Stamford Military Hospital.
In 2013/14 over 60,000 volunteers gave more than 4 million hours of their time in a range of roles, from house and garden guides, volunteer gardeners and volunteer rangers in the countryside to those helping us with the development of our digital channels. We could not do our work without their time and skills and we remain enormously grateful for all that they do. While our overall volunteer numbers were lower than 2012/13, the number of individual volunteers giving time on a regular basis remained high at around 40,000 and overall hours gifted by volunteers were 450,000 higher than last year. The drop in volunteer numbers was in part due to less group volunteer involvement this year.
The number of volunteers who would ‘strongly recommend’ their experience to others stayed the same – 63% against our target of 67%. 94 of the 254 properties and locations that took part in the survey met or exceeded this target. Our combined score of volunteers who ‘would recommend’ and ‘would strongly recommend’ volunteering with us remained very high at 95%.
We continued to focus on supporting staff to organise and manage our volunteers well and on developing plans for better systems and processes that will be implemented in 2014. These will improve the way we recruit and communicate with volunteers and help us monitor and respond to changes in volunteer numbers. With support from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and companies including Barclays and Jaguar LandRover, we also piloted an initiative called the ‘Big Family Day Out,’ which gave families the chance to volunteer together. The days were a great success.
The money we raise from membership and fundraising provides crucial funding for conservation. This year we welcomed 745,424 new members. We ended the year with 4.1 million members. In 2012/13, 84.2% of memberships were renewed. In 2013/14 this figure increased to 85.0%. Our value for money scores remained strong at 8.3 on a scale from 0 to 10. Our net promoter score was also strong at 52 compared to 34.5 last year, an increase resulting in part from changes to the survey methodology and response mechanism9.
Fundraising remains a vital source of income for the National Trust, second only to membership and equating to approximately 17% of total income. We are very grateful to the many organisations and individuals who support our fundraising appeals, without whom some of our most important projects and acquisitions would not be possible. Our income from fundraising sources totalled £79 million this year, a 20% decrease on last year. This is because we received exceptional ‘one-off’ project grants for Dyffryn Gardens and Tredegar House (totalling almost £20 million) in 2012/13. Another factor was a reduction in legacy income, from £50 million in 2012/13 to £46 million. There has been a gradual decline in legacy income for several years and we are making a substantial investment in this area, to encourage legacy giving and grow this vital income stream. This will form an important part of our new fundraising strategy in 2014/15, which aims to increase income from external sources from £75 million to £100 million by 2025.
Our fundraising efforts have been focused on Knole in Kent where we are undertaking an ambitious £11.5 million fundraising campaign, including a £7.75 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, to restore this former royal palace and engage more people with its history and treasures. Our members and donors also helped us raise money for a number of important public appeals in aid of the Lake District and the re-roofing of Dyrham Park near Bath.
During 2013 we began to lay the foundations we need to run an effective supporter loyalty programme. We started design on a data warehouse that will bring all our different data sets together, and we purchased systems that will make it easier to communicate on a personal basis with supporters about the things that interest them.
We look after special places on behalf of everyone. We want to encourage more people to join us in caring about them too. Over the last two years we have focused on children’s connection with nature. Research shows that children benefit from getting outdoors, physically and emotionally, but only one in five children feels connected to nature. We are addressing this in two ways – first through our successful campaign 50 things to do before you’re 11¾ and second, by founding a new partnership, The Wild Network.
Conservation lies at the heart of our work so understanding how well we are performing is vital. During 2013/14 our Conservation Performance Indicator (CPI)10 has been developed to provide information about a wider range of our assets. For the first time we have been able to assess performance trends over a three-year period. We have achieved our Key Performance Indicator targets with all properties having carried out the CPI and with 85% improving or maintaining their score. In the face of rapid environmental change and increasing visitor numbers, simply maintaining the condition of our properties requires much work.
The extremely wet and stormy weather over the winter highlighted the challenges the natural environment can present. Our 742 miles of coastline property were the most badly affected. Very high tides and rising sea level combined with intense wind caused multiple breaches of coastal defences. These conditions also caused erosion of sand dunes, damage to harbour structures, loss of coastal footpaths and access tracks and rapid cliff erosion at places such as Birling Gap in East Sussex.
Learning how to adapt to these extremes of weather is increasingly important. The same need applies inland – understanding how water catchments work and how land can be used to manage water and alleviate flooding, complementing engineered solutions, as shown by our work at our Holnicote Estate in Somerset.
Some 43% of the surface area of England and Wales drains to the boundary or through our properties so we have a strong interest in what happens upstream of us. Our coastal and water management policies, Shifting Shores and From Source to Sea, have come to the fore as the nation grapples with these challenges.
Our overall level of property project expenditure increased to £91.3 million from £79.7 million last year, with a huge range of projects undertaken11. These ranged from the conservation of major buildings and their interiors at Castle Drogo in Devon and Knole in Kent, to the restoration of the landscape at Woodchester Park in Gloucestershire and the joint acquisition with the Woodland Trust of 61.4 hectares of Fingle Woods along the River Teign in Devon12. We have also focused on improving the condition of our 5,000 tenanted houses and cottages. Of these projects, £16.7 million was spent on backlog repair work and reducing this further remains a priority in our future plans (see financial review on pages 16 to 19).
Plant and tree disease continues to be a concern with weak controls on global plant movements and the UK climate increasingly conducive to the spread of disease. Our systematic plant recording of all our rare species in the gardens across the Trust, in conjunction with our recently created bio-secure plant propagation and conservation centre in the West Country, is an important contribution towards securing the future of these species.
We continue to manage a significant amount of land in-hand, mainly due to conservation demands, and claim the Single Payment directly on approximately 27,000 hectares of land that we farm across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We achieve our management objectives on this land primarily through appropriate grazing, which includes farming more than 3,600 sheep, 800 cattle and 200 horses and ponies we own, many of which are historically important rare breeds.
To minimise the adverse impact on the environment of our activities, we have identified four areas for attention: energy use and generation, water use, waste production, and our carbon emissions. Our initial focus is on energy reduction where we have set a national target of reducing our 2009 in-house consumption by 20% by 2020. Having made some good progress in the early years, we have found it hard going in 2013/14, partly because of substantially increased visitor numbers and opening hours. Our 2013/14 target was an 11% reduction. We achieved a 4% reduction.
Our target is to generate 50% of our energy use by 2020 from renewable sources. In addition to our many existing smaller-scale renewable energy schemes, we initiated a major project in 2013/14 at five properties to trial the cost/benefit of three sources of renewable energy: hydro-electricity, biomass and marine heat-pumps. If these are successful, we hope to roll out this technology with a proposed £30 million investment. Our new hydro scheme at Hafod y Llan is described here.
During the year we analysed the biggest internal and external conservation challenges facing the nation and the National Trust. We have concluded that a major challenge is the decline in the health of our nature and ecosystem services – the benefits we all get from a healthy natural environment and the good use of land. We are developing a plan to help address these challenges, including a tool we have introduced to identify the best use of any area of land by assessing its capability for different uses.
As noted in the Highlights of the year section, we continue to cope with development pressure affecting the settings of our properties, particularly relating to transport and energy infrastructure. These range from the proposed route of High Speed 2, where it runs close to some of our properties, through major wind turbine proposals affecting the historic settings of Lyveden New Bield in Northamptonshire and Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, to major new pylon and power line proposals on Anglesey in North Wales and across the Welsh countryside. We will continue to monitor these pressures and respond as necessary.
We have over 5,000 permanent staff who work with us all year, but this rises to over 11,000 staff in our busiest months, when our seasonal staff join us. Whether our staff are permanent or just with us for a few months, we take their welfare and training seriously – they are ambassadors for the Trust. Every year we ask them through our staff survey to tell us how well we are performing across a range of areas. We use that insight to shape our plans to ensure we have confident, capable managers and staff, with the right skills and expertise to be able to look after our special places.
We measure staff satisfaction through an annual staff survey. The 2013 staff survey was very positive. We had a record response rate and met our annual staff satisfaction target. Our overall staff satisfaction rating, which is the total of all staff agreeing and strongly agreeing with our staff survey questions, is now at 92%. This is consistent with 2012 and up on 2011.
This year’s survey results also showed that we continue to do well in motivating and developing our staff and they feel confident to do their jobs. While the results demonstrate the Trust has improved its decision-making, our staff tell us there is still more to do in this area. This will continue to be a priority.
We have seen a dramatic improvement in our annual operational management satisfaction score. This annual survey is completed by our property and general managers and our regional management teams. It measures how empowered and supported they feel. This year the score increased from 62% to 79% following actions taken by the Executive Team, including those outlined below. We were delighted with the improvement but will continue to monitor this important indicator.
We have continued to develop the skills of our property teams and volunteers to deliver an excellent visitor experience. Over the year every property team received training in our Service Leadership programme13. This is beginning to improve the levels of service given at our properties. We also worked closely with our rangers, tailoring a programme to improve the visitor experience at our outdoor properties. We continued to focus on developing the leadership skills of our managers in 2013/14, through our Future Engage and Deliver leadership programme. This training programme ensures our managers have the skills and confidence to lead their teams and deliver our plans.
These activities and improvements have led to further successes. In 2013 the Trust was named a ‘Best Companies’ organisation, as well as one of The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies To Work For. We are delighted with this recognition.
In 2014/15 our focus continues to be: improving the experience we offer our visitors; getting better at our management and engagement of volunteers; reducing our energy use; investing in our let estate; and addressing our priority conservation needs.
We have identified that we need to do more to redress the big deficit in the condition of land and nature across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The pressures of intensive farming, development and modern living are all taking their toll – so we will be reviewing how, as a leading organisation in the countryside, we can best play our part in addressing this and showing our leadership in this area.
We also need to promote our cause better: to do more to grow the nation’s love of special places. This needs to infuse everything we do, from how we greet visitors, to how we interpret our properties, communicate with our members and encourage donors to support us.
To make it easier for us to do our work, our top priority is improving the systems and processes that support us. Our Systems Simplification Programme (SSP) is designed to address this. It is focused on making our financial and commercial systems much easier to use, and on making significant improvements to how we communicate with our members and supporters. It is critical to our long-term success. Work began on SSP in 2013/14 and will take several years to complete.
Priorities in our organisational plan for 2014/15 are to:
Among other objectives we plan to:
Following a review of our KPI measures, some changes have been made which are reflected in the table of targets below.
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