Hutting: Why aren’t we doing more of it?

But having just spent the day with hundreds of hutters in Dundee, I’m wondering why there aren’t many more communities like The Encampment. The reason the hutters came together was The Hutters’ Rally, a day of talks and workshops organised by Reforesting Scotland, which has campaigned to increase hutting, and I recognised the passion and enthusiasm right away. I’ve been involved with The Encampment for the last few years as it’s grown into a community and I’ve seen it first hand: when people get the hutting bug, they get it bad.

But there’s a difference between enthusiasm for hutting (and the sometimes romantic notion of a hideaway in the forest) and the realities of making it work; and listening to the talks at the rally, it was obvious we’re still some way off from getting the model right. There are good examples of communities that have got off the ground in recent years – Carnock in Fife is one – but it’s also obvious that in some ways hutting has stalled in Scotland and that there are barriers in the way.

One of the most obvious is planning. One of the hutters from Carnock told the rally there were a few good signs and that in some ways the planning may get a little bit easier as precedents are set at Carnock, The Encampment, and elsewhere; basically, the pioneers have to go through the mill so that it can maybe get marginally easier for the ones that follow. The suspicion remains, though, that planning hurdles (not to mention the legal and financial ones) are still making it far too hard for hutting communities to get off the ground.

But it’s also important to maintain the right balance between idealism and realism. There’s an idea promoted by some that the biggest barrier to hutting is big bad capitalist landowners and the fact Scotland’s land isn’t collectively owned. It also seeks to explicitly link hutting to a radical left, reductionist (and often Scottish nationalist) agenda which in my experience just isn’t how most hutters think; they want to be part of a community but they’re also looking for a place of their own, because that’s how the human instinct works.

It's also important to remember that there isn’t just one model of how hutting works; in fact, the planning consultant (and hutter) Richard Hegge did a very good presentation to the rally on the range of ways in which hutting communities have emerged in Scotland. Sometimes it’s a group of people coming together to lease a plot; sometimes it’s a public agency looking for hutters; sometimes, it’s a private individual with a bit of land; sometimes people are putting up huts on land they own themselves. Point is: there are lots of different ways of doing this.

Which leaves the most important question facing hutting: how do we encourage more of the same? The model at Carnock is interesting because it’s the first time huts have gone up on public land, in this case land owned by the government agency Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS). The model at The Encampment on the other hand is huts being leased from a private individual who bought the land with a view to setting up the community. In an ideal world, we would encourage and facilitate both models, and others, and importantly, it always has to stack up financially and be in the interests of the hutters and the landowners.

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There was a time when the Scottish Government seemed to get this. In 2014 for example, they created a new planning policy that was designed to increase hutting, but there’s still a wide variation in how councils are applying it. Speaking to the hutters and landowners in Dundee, it’s also obvious that the hurdles they face are still considerable and, importantly, getting over those hurdles often involves employing lawyers, consultants, experts and so on; spending a lot of money in other words.

It seems to me that one easy win the Scottish Government could consider is changing the rules on forestry land. The Carnock hutters’ land was leased from FLS but sadly it looks like the agency isn’t looking to replicate the model because they believe Carnock “isn’t open enough” even though the hutters held open sessions and a democratic ballot. Also, the idea of a hut that’s potentially open to everyone, AirBNB-style, isn’t going to work because that immediately involves extra costs, bureaucracy and people to run it. It’s idealism trumping realism again.

A better option – and a cheaper one as well, the government will be pleased to hear – would be to change the rules so that a small proportion of forestry land – five per cent say – is allocated for potential hutting. The precise way it’s done would be up to the hutters who come forward – they might lease the land, they might buy it. But the knowledge that a proportion of public land has been set aside for hutting would certainly make it a more realistic option for a lot of people and give the idea the prominence it deserves.

The problem is that, as the experts at the rally told me a few times, the Government doesn’t seem to have a great interest in the issue at the moment even though, as I say, it could be an easy win. In some ways, I get it – Humza Yousaf and his colleagues have a lot on their plates at the moment. But there’s stuff they can do. Allocate more public land for hutting; make it easier for private landowners to lease their land to hutters; make it clear to councils that planning barriers need to come down; and we might start to see some results. I’ve seen for myself what hutting can do – for the hutters, for communities, and for the landscape – and more of the same would undoubtedly be good.