Petition

I would like to introduce Heather Martin, who will be giving the presentation.

The other person is Mr Bill McQueen. We are all members of the hutters association.

Yes, and of the Carbeth Hutters Association committee.

Certainly—

I will give a brief background to the dispute at Carbeth. The huts began over 70 years ago, under the proprietorship of the present landlord's grandfather. When the current landlord took over in 1990, he embarked on rent rises that went out of control. In 1997, most hutters decided that it had gone too far, and intimated to the estate their intention to withhold part of the site charges. The letter that was handed in from a number of the hutters—it makes up the petition—refers to the land reform policy group's recommendations for action from January of this year. Mentioned in those was the possible introduction of legislation to provide security of tenure and rights of access plus a mechanism for settling rents and other disputes. The final recommendation was that there should be further study on the matter. We strongly believe that that recommendation should be implemented.In cases where people own property on rented land, and that property cannot be removed without being destroyed, their lease should be a secure tenancy. They should have access to rent control, to ensure that rents cannot be increased above the rate of inflation without justification. Mr Peter Scott, a law lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, has prepared a briefing paper for the Justice and Home Affairs Committee. He is unable to attend today due to work commitments, but he has expressed his willingness to answer any questions and elaborate on any of the points that he has raised, if the committee wishes to contact him.

I can tell you exactly. The rent was 10 shillings before the war. After the war, in 1948, it was £1. It was £5 in 1958, after the grandfather of the present landlord died. The rents have risen by over 13 per cent yearly until 1996, when we received a newsletter about the rents. The huts used to be of the same standards. Some were put up on premium sites. In the spring 1997 newsletter, it was stated that the rents would be based at £888 from 17 May 1997. The rent was £529 in 1996; they were to go up to £888 in 1997. Does that answer your question?

They went up even further. I have a couple of brochures, headed "Chalets at Carbeth Estate – How to Buy" from 24 November 1997 and 27 February 1998. They show that the monthly rent was to be £90 a month—just over £1,000 per annum. I have a spare copy of those brochures that I can deposit with the clerk if members wish to refer to them.

The increase represents a doubling in two years.

We pay taxation. We pay a non-domestic taxation rate of approximately £140 or £150.

Yes, on top of the rent. I need to point out that there are hundreds of huts all over Scotland—and England. We have visited eight hut sites. The rents there ranged from £55 a year to £200. The hutters are complaining about the rise to £200, having heard of the rents being asked at Carbeth.

We have had nothing back from the site. On my site, the landlords have not spent a penny for 60 years. I am a retired clerk of works and maintenance officer. As far as repairs go, the site has to be seen to appreciate how much disrepair it is in at present. The site is a disgrace. I do not know why the council hasnae stepped in and done something about it.

We actually have some boards with—

We have brought some photographs displayed on boards, if members would like to see photographs of the huts and the estate, to get a clearer idea of the site.

Shall I pass them round?

No.

One has pictures of the huts that are well maintained. They show how we would prefer to see the site. The other board shows how things have become run down over the past few years.

Exactly.

That is right.

Just by virtue of the fact that so little has been spent on upgrading the site and looking after it.

They are huts that have reverted to the ownership of the estate.

Members should understand that—

As far as I am aware, but I have not researched that in any detail.

Yes.

At the moment there are folk on the site who have been there for 50 years and who have put in 50 years' worth of repairs on the huts. They are still governed by a lease that allows the landlord, first, to put up the rents in any way that he pleases and, secondly, to throw anyone off at 40 days' notice without having to give any reason whatsoever. If the hutter is not able to sell their hut to someone, who has to be approved by the landlord in those 40 days, the landlord takes possession of the hut without paying compensation.

We are campaigning for a bill on rent control for residential huts and chalets that are fixtures to the ground, which was defined in a House of Lords ruling on the Welsh hutters' case two years ago. We think that that could be done in Scotland and that it is the only way in which this situation can be resolved. The Rent Registration Service, a body that is already in existence, could adjudicate on rent disputes.

That was the general idea.

That is right.

They have changed entirely.

The original trust appears to have been wound up at some point around 1990—I am not sure of the date—and a new trust was set up. The terms of the new trust are geared to allow the landlord to do whatever he likes. We have it on record from the landlord's evidence in court that it was set up for tax reasons. A clause in the landlord's grandfather's will stipulated that the estate of Carbeth should not be feued or leased in such a way as to interfere with the rights of possession of the traditional hutters. Linked to that, there may have been other reasons why the original trust was wound up—it may have been too restrictive. Now, the estate appears to be considering the land solely in terms of a product from which to maximise income.

I have not seen the deeds of the original trust. However, I would infer that from the wording of the will of the grandfather who set up the place.

There is a tap for every 16 or so huts and there has been some construction of new tracks. A cliff was pulled to pieces by a JCB and the pebbles and rocks from that were partly distributed around the estate. I have a third document that I can lodge with the clerk, which is a report by Robert Balfour, who is, I believe, soon to become the new convener of the Scottish Landowners Federation. He is also a land surveyor. He toured Carbeth estate and, after examining the surfaces, he estimated that their value was around £50 per annum.

I wish to make it clear that no services are provided to the individual huts. They have no running water, electricity, gas or sewerage—all services that would be associated with caravan sites, for example. Such services are not provided at all. Stirling Council provides water and rubbish collection, which are paid for by rates.

Absolutely.

We think that the terms are entirely unreasonable. There is a copy of a lease in the folders that Heather gave out. I should advise that the folders contain background information, should members need to look up anything after the meeting. The clauses that are at the root of the problem are those that refer to 40 days' notice and to the conflicting property rights, if you like. We own the huts, but the landlord owns the ground and has the power to take huts away from us without compensation. We feel that it is grossly unfair that someone can have had a hut for so long, have put so much work into it and have expended so much energy on it, only to lose it. The estate has claimed that that is a nice, clean and easy clause that allows it to get rid of unsociable hutters. While we all agree that there should be some term that enables the estate to go through the procedures to get rid of unsociable hutters, that clause has caused countless problems. Five or six years ago, the estate tried to evict one of its representatives—Mr Hanratty, who is here today—but the clause simply failed.

It favours the landlord entirely. There are around 56 stipulations in the lease on what hutters must or must not do. The sole obligation on the landlord is to let land—of, I think, 20 ft by 30 ft—for a year.

We have considered that. Sixteen or a dozen cases are on-going—

I think that one of them is in court today.We have considered various approaches but a succession of sheriffs has upheld the lease. They have said that, be it fair or unfair, the lease holds in law and that we have no protection in law. We are considering as many approaches as possible. One of the papers in members' folders is a report by Peter Scott, which Heather may wish to refer to.

One of the most important documents that members should consider is Peter Scott's briefing note. He is an expert in property law and has closely examined the situation. He is more able than we are—as lay people—to examine the legal arguments.

We signed the new lease in 1993. We received two letters, one in the morning post and the other in the afternoon post, before we signed the new lease. I have the letters here if members wish to see them. The first letter said that great changes would be made to the Carbeth estate but that we had to sign the new lease for those changes to be made. The letter received in the afternoon post said that our tenancies were terminated, so if we did not sign the new lease we would be evicted. We had no option—we either walked away from our huts or signed the lease.

They were very similar. There were a few points, but they were almost the same.

They had the 40 days clause.

Yes—from memory.

They were brought in as holiday homes, although people stayed in them during the Clydebank blitz during the war and stayed on for a couple of years. Other people also lived in them, as they were able to get on to the local housing list. People bought huts for that sole purpose. The council wanted to stop that practice and classified them as holiday huts. However, they are not holiday huts at all. Many people stay in them permanently, including many of the estate workers. Some people have stayed in them, full time, for 40 years—I could give members the names of a dozen people who still live in them, including me.

I have not visited those huts, although some of our members have visited huts in Wales.

I have visited them.

The huts that I referred to were those on the eight sites in Scotland. They were built in exactly the same way as our huts were built. They were built a wee bit at a time—a foundation was laid and they were built bit by bit, stick by stick. Nearly all huts were built like that. Some new chalets are being built differently, but huts are built in the same way across the country. They are not prefabricated—people bring wee bits at a time. They have been built that way in England.

The crucial point under debate in the case of the Welsh huts, which lasted more than eight years and which ended with the hutters winning in the House of Lords, was whether the huts were part of the ground—whether they could be moved without being destroyed. That may be the definition of a hut—it cannot be moved without being destroyed because of the way in which it is built. It is a legal fiction, as the estate would have it, that one can just pick up one's hut and transport it to the back garden or whatever. Quite apart from planning laws, that is not physically possible. Perhaps the committee could consider how to frame legislation so that it covers only huts such as those in Carbeth. The other issue is the clause in the lease that states that hutters must have another principal place of residence. According to the courts, we have no protection under any housing legislation. A hut is a piece of property that is owned by one person, and placed, with permission, on the land of another person. It cannot be moved from that land without being destroyed. That differentiates hutters from those who use, for example, caravan sites.

As far as I know, it is a bit confused because the Welsh hutters did not have leases. They had licence agreements that were weaker than a lease. Different hutters have had different licences at different times. At the moment, the owner of the site—who acquired it for development purposes—is caught between the bank to which he owes a lot of money and the hutters whose huts he must now maintain and look after. He is, as far as I know, still not accepting rents and so there are no leases.

That seems to be case. I cannot speak about the history of the case with any certainty.

Yes.

I am not sure what the mechanism to achieve that would be.

We would like the Rent Registration Service to take that arbitration role. The service deals with housing rents and we do not see any problems in its dealing with ground rents or site rents for huts and chalets.

The nature of the huts is well-enough defined in the case of those huts or chalets that are classified as fixtures to the ground.

We think that that is very important.

That is correct.

The rents were meant to be £808 from 17 May 1997, but that was not to be implemented until 1999. Premium rents were increased by 42 per cent in that year.

In 1997 it would have been £888. The landlord could have added any increases he wanted up to the present moment.

The rent figures that have been given by the estate have gone up and down considerably in the past couple of years. At the moment the estate is advertising huts at £68 a month, which, at a quick guess is just over £800 a year. The figure in our book comes from documents that were issued by the estate at the end of 1997 and the beginning of 1998. Those documents quote a rent of £90 a month, or £906 per annum. The cost of paying £90 a month would be £1,080 per annum.

If you read the estate owner's newsletters you get a wee bit bamboozled because they are, among other things, contradictory. The rent has gone up from £529 in 1996. Standard rent went up, I think, to £672. Rent on premium sites went up to £750.

Perhaps the detail is not as important as the fact that the lease allows the landlord to do whatever he likes. He can add any charges he wants whenever he wants to add them.My first involvement in this issue was when we received notice of rent increases. We decided that we were going to have to sell the hut as we could not afford it. We applied to the estate to sell the hut and the estate told us that the hut was in a particularly nice spot so a transfer charge of £1,500 or £1,750 would be applied to it. That meant that someone who bought the hut for perhaps £1,250 would then have to pay a further £1,500 or £1,750 to the estate.It is the fact that the lease enables the landlord to add whatever charges he wants whenever he wants that is dangerous. Our understanding is that anyone coming on to the site is being offered huts at a cost of £68 a month. The landlord usually charges more if tenants are paying rent monthly, so that may account for the discrepancy.

That is correct.

I purchased the remains of a hut—some pieces of wood and a few bits of broken glass.

Yes, I did.

The track was covered with rubble from quarrying that the estate owner had been doing.

No—the rubble was piled on top of the original track.

I think that the estate would say that it was meant as an improvement, but whether it was meant to be for the benefit of the hutters is open to question. Most people would say that it is an eyesore that adds nothing to the estate.

I joined the campaign with the other hutters at Carbeth at the same time as everyone else.

The amount of money that I have paid to the estate is relevant to the court case that is going on between me and Mr Barns-Graham, so I should not comment on that.

I would like to point out that the roads are just rubble. It is not hard core. The landlord has talked about the cost of putting that stuff on the road. He wanted planning permission to build a house and had to remove 2.5 m of cliff and cut it back at an angle. That resulted in thousands of tonnes of rubble being scattered all over the place. You could not walk on a lot of the roads, nor could you take a car on them. We are not really talking about roads here—we are talking about rubble that has been put on top of the original paths.

I would like to quote from a report by Mr Robert Balfour. He said:"Provision of access is not a service as the rent should cover the renting of the property to include the access road. As an access road is a communal area it is possible to charge a service charge to cover the maintenance. Service charge by its very name cannot be used to recover capital cost".

I am quoting from a report by Robert Balfour of the Scottish Landowners' Federation. He came to the estate as a surveyor.

Yes.

He has served eviction notices on 90 people. Of those 90, four or five of us have gone to the courts and lost our cases.

Two have settled up and come to an agreement with the landlord and the other three have mysteriously lost their huts in arson attacks which have been put down to vandals.

That is exactly what he is doing. I have a letter here that was issued after I had received an eviction notice in the court. It says that the landlord's reason for going to court was to ensure that everyone knew his rights as a landowner. He stated in court that his right as a landowner was to charge any rent he wanted to charge. He said that, if he wished, he could legally charge £20,000 million. Before people went to court, the landlord said that if they paid all the money that he wanted, they were welcome back. I have a letter here that was delivered to every hutter. It states that I am a first-class hutter, "a highly respected hutter", and that I will be very welcome back. This is not about eviction at all; it is about forcing all the hutters to accept ridiculous rent.

There are various documents in Stirling planning department. I have a couple here, which I will leave with the clerk. There is a letter from David Egerton, development control manager in planning services. It states:"I would invite you to consider a further meeting with officers to discuss the potential comprehensive redevelopment . . . of the chalet complex".There is a handwritten note of a meeting of 24 November 1995. It mentions"relocation of areas within estate, timescale for relocation of areas . . . New numbers would be dependent on size of area.15 per acre? (ie caravan standards)". Mr Smith, one of the trustees, has assured us that at the moment there are no plans for development. We believe him and take his word on that, but the evidence from the planning department is that plans have been discussed with it, although nothing concrete has been put in.

We hope that any legislation would stop this whole affair, which has been messy and unnecessary.

We hope that it would prevent this from happening anywhere else. We believe that there are 600 hutters across Scotland and hope that legislation would prevent a repeat of this fiasco anywhere else. We believe that the land is unusable for any other purposes. It is too poor for any agricultural use other than grazing, and much of it has ancient woodland on it. The land is in the green belt outside Glasgow. We believe that the landlord has concluded that, short of gaining planning permission to redevelop—which he is unlikely to get—the huts are the best income. We hope that legislation will force him to negotiate. We have had a couple of meetings, one with the local MPs—Anne McGuire and Tony Worthington—and representatives of the estate. We hope to continue to negotiate. At one of the most recent meetings—last week, in the presence of Anne McGuire and Tony Worthington—the estate was speaking in a friendly tone. We welcome that, but yesterday every hutter was sent out a newsletter from Mr Barns-Graham. I will quote parts of it: "our attempts . . . has been sabotaged by those who continue to lie and misinform . . . This is the type of insult, typical of those who claim to represent the hutters . . . libellous . . . How do we know whether the same fires were not started by those connected with the strike for the purpose of gaining sympathy support . . . Lies, misinformation and ridiculous claims . . . Deliberate lies, . . . proven to be lies . . . silly . . . It is untrue, it is also an insult, . . . It is also an insult. . . . It is about time that the lies and the bullying stopped . . . why can they only lie about Carbeth?"All of that is in a three-page document, which I will also leave with the clerk, sent to all hutters yesterday in the wake of the negotiation meeting that we had with Anne McGuire and Tony Worthington last week. That is the estate trying to be conciliatory.

We are not lawyers, and there is vastly more experience on the committee than we have. Part of our problem is that we have always been refused legal aid, which is why a lot of us are fighting our own cases. We have been examining the possibility of a change to the Sheriff Courts (Scotland) Act 1907, under clause 37 of which we are being evicted. An addition to that clause might be a simple way to enable us to have some form of security of tenure.

It has always been signed on trust. The fact that there are people on the site who have been there for 50 years shows that trust had been maintained until two or three years ago.

That is right. I should speak carefully here, but people have agreed to say under oath that that has been said to them.

We are all for legislation that will improve the huts. We have had discussions with Stirling Council about making the estate a conservation area. We would like the council to ensure that the huts are properly kept and that the place is nice and tidy. We would welcome that.

In terms of the amount of money, the upgrading of tracks is the principal expenditure. To put that into perspective, the estate had some rock that could be used to put the base of a road down. I am not an engineer, but I know that you must put a base down for a road. To get at the rock, a crusher had to be hired and the best deal available was to bring one up from England. That had to be brought up on a loader and was on the estate for quite a long time. Some of the roads have natural small streams running by them or underneath them. In one place, quite a big concrete culvert had to be built before the road could be put on top. With roads, it is also necessary to do ditching work at the side. The road that goes down to Heather Martin's hut was mentioned. I drove down it two weeks ago. It is on an estate, so it is not a motorway but it is a road that you can drive a car down. The roads represent the biggest item of expenditure; there is a lot more to putting down a road than just throwing a few rocks down.

That is not my understanding, although I do not know for sure. I could not say definitely. I know that the estate management always tries to get two jobs for one, so it may well be the case that the removal of the cliff assisted with other work. Refuse is removed by the council but the vehicles have to get up there to take it away. If we had not used the material from the cliff for road bases and hard standings for rubbish bins, we would have had to bring other material to the site, which would obviously have cost even more money.

In order to maximise the income to the estate, we would probably have sold the material as base for other people who are building roads.

We refer to 169 hut owners. Tony Meehan will have the actual figures. There is a difference between the number of hut owners and the number of sites. There are many sites for huts on the estate, some of which are not occupied by huts. It is a bit of a movable feast, but in terms of the rent strike, there are 169 hut owners.

There are 169 huts. Of those, 93 are paying rent. There are 20 unoccupied huts—huts that are either unoccupied or have no leases attached to them. There are 18 derelict huts, which are just wood sitting on a piece of land. We believe that, therefore, the number of striking hutters—

Yes, there are 169 hut sites with property on them, 20 of which are unoccupied.

Yes, 20 are unoccupied, and 18 are derelict. So if you take 38 from 169, you will have the number of leases that are currently in force or the number of people in residence.

Correct.

A total of 93 are paying rent.

Which is Mr Barns-Graham's terminology for paying rent.

Correct.

A dispute about rent, yes.

Not as far as I am aware, but a lot of issues other than rent seem to be being discussed this morning.

Yes. That is right.

No. Eviction notices were served on 80 people at the start of the dispute. Since that time, some of the people who received eviction notices have decided to pay their rent. Hence the change in the figures.

I cannot do the arithmetic, but there are 38 non-payers left, so roughly half of them came back and said that they would pay the rent.

We think that the Carbeth Hutters Association represents the minority. We also think that the increase in rent was the original cause of the difficulty. Since that time other issues have come to light that have proved problematical. We are happy to try to address those but, essentially, we think that this is a rent dispute with a few vociferous people who do not represent the majority of the hutters.

Yes. There has been a lot of talk about trusts which, at the end of the day, are just legal entities. The grandfather's will contained a general statement that he hoped that the hutters would continue to be part of the estate and would continue to be looked after. However, as far as I know, he did not set up a trust to look after the land. His estate would have been wound up—as would anybody's—when he passed on.

No.

That is correct. I do not have the will in front of me, but if he said in his will that a trust had to be set up, one would have been set up.

I understand that. There was not a trust set up to look after the Carbeth hutters under the will of the late Mr Barns-Graham—the grandfather.