They have an advisory role over administration matters and, especially, national park management plans and the appointment of national park officers. NPAs maintain close contact with both agencies, as they do with English Nature, English Heritage and Cadw. The Departments The Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions in England, and the Welsh Office in Wales, approve the budgets of the NPAs and pay 75 percent of the predicted expenditure in their respective countries. They also fund the agencies already named. For those reasons, the departments keep in direct contact with the NPAs themselves.
Every national park provides the focus for a voluntary society.
They all support an umbrella organisation called the Council for National Parks. It inherited the mantle of the Standing Committee for National Parks of the CPRE in the early 1980s.