In a 3-year PhD programme, what are the tasks of the first year? As a supervisor, how should I reasonably set the task timeline for a new (Engineering) PhD student, given there is a candidature confirmation at the 9-month mark?

In other words, how long is reasonable for settling down to a new country, literature review, defining a research topic, data collection, drafting a publication ...etc?

The programme is 3 years, and the student has a scholarship from the university without a defined research project. We agreed on a field of research, though.
Look at what the requirements for the confirmation review are. Ask others in the department who will be assessing the report what it is they look for. Ask to see some examples of previous reports that passed, and ideally, some that didn't. 

In our place student must demonstrate:

1) They have defined a project with well articulated aims and at least an idea of how to meet these aims. The student is not just pottering around the area. Nor are they acting as a technician on various things going on in their supervisors lab.

2) They can explain what the importance of their project is and where it fits in to the larger field (that is their project has not just been dictated by their supervisor without them having any idea about its purpose).

3) Have have a working knowlegde of the general background in the field, and of recent literature directly relevant to their project. They know if others have worked on the same question and what they have found. 

4) They can demonstrate an understanding of what the key techniques in their project are, how they work, and what are likely to be the bottlenecks. 

5) Usually students have SOMETHING in the way of experimental results, but often not very much. They might have a graph or two on optimizing their system, they may have shown that the system works with some positive controls or have reproduced some of the key results from the literature. We don't usually expect concrete progress on new knowledge at this point.