New planning guide generates hutting resurgence in Scotland

Campaign group Reforesting Scotland has launched a Good Practice Guide on Hutting in Scotland.

Around 80 planning professionals, architects and hut builders attended the launch at a Scottish Parliament event hosted by Angus Macdonald, MSP cabinet secretary for rural affairs.

Since ‘huts’ were first acknowledged as a distinctive form of development in Scotland in Scottish Planning Policy (SPP) in 2014, there has been a lack of specific guidance on how local authorities, architects, planners and the hut builders should approach designing, building and consenting these structures.

Reforesting Scotland’s Thousand Huts campaign has an online community of almost 4000 members and in 2013, more people responded to the consultation on the Scottish Planning Policy on the issue of hutting than any other planning issue.

Reforesting Scotland’s guide aims to clarify a number of planning considerations including what constitutes a hut, where huts might be built and the land immediately surrounding a hut, the density of development and special considerations for planning hut sites. It also seeks to set out the wider context by covering issues such as the management of hut sites, tenure and land ownership.

The 28 page document states that “The intention in doing this is to help lay the groundwork for a new hutting culture beneficial to the wellbeing of people and the environment”.

There has been a resurgence in the popularity of hutting today, with these structures once built to provide industrial workers with a natural retreat from the city becoming popular once again with modern society for the same reason. 140 huts still provide accommodation for Scotland’s largest remaining hutting community at Carbet, near Glasgow and many people are demanding more sites as they wish to become reconnected to their natural surroundings.

Angus Dodds, Savills Rural Planner based in Edinburgh, said: “Huts are really exciting for lots of different reasons, not least because they represent a completely new type of planning unit than we are accustomed to, and by extension, potential business opportunities for our clients.”