England Golf and buggy access: what a club policy should cover

What has changed in what clubs are expected to do

For years, buggy use at a lot of clubs was handled as a concession. A member asked, the committee considered it, and a permission was granted that could be reviewed, withdrawn or quietly forgotten. It was well meant and it often worked, but it left the golfer dependent on goodwill and left the club with no consistent basis for saying yes to one person and no to another.

The expectation now is different. Buggy use where a golfer cannot walk the course is treated as an access question, which means the club is expected to have thought about it before anybody asks, to have a route by which a request is made and decided, and to be able to explain its reasoning. That is a change of posture more than a change of paperwork, though the paperwork usually has to catch up.

For most clubs the practical effect is small and the cultural effect is larger. Little of the day to day changes: the fleet is the same size, and the wet course still closes to everybody. What changes is that a decision now has to be defensible rather than discretionary, that somebody can be asked to explain it, and that a golfer refused access should be able to see the reasoning.

Guidance, policy and law are three separate things

Keep them apart in your head while drafting. Guidance is what England Golf publishes for affiliated clubs. Policy is what your club decides and writes down. Law is the Equality Act and the duties it places on service providers and on associations, along with separate legislation of similar effect in Northern Ireland. The three should agree, and where they do not, it is the club's policy that needs to move.

Guidance does not carry the force of law, and it would be wrong to tell you otherwise. What it carries is expectation. It is what a member will hold up in a complaint, what a county association will point at, and often what an insurer or a solicitor treats as the reasonable standard for a club of your kind. A committee that departs from published guidance is not breaking a rule, but it should be able to say why it did.

Our guide on the Equality Act sets out the duty to make reasonable adjustments and the fact that the duty is anticipatory, meaning it is meant to be planned for rather than arranged when somebody asks. That is the legal idea sitting underneath all of this, and reading it alongside the published guidance gives a committee most of what it needs before anybody starts drafting wording.

Read the published document rather than a summary

We deliberately do not reproduce or paraphrase the clauses here. Documents of this kind are revised, and a paraphrase written today becomes a slightly wrong version of the guidance the moment it changes, which then gets quoted back at committees by people acting in good faith. The version that matters is the one currently published by England Golf, and it is the club's job to be reading that.

Get it directly from the governing body rather than from a forum post or an article. If your club is affiliated, the club support side of the organisation and your county association are the routes to ask when something in it is unclear as applied to your course. Print the current version, date the printout, and keep it with the policy file so that a future committee can see what the club was working from.

Clubs outside England should look to their own national body rather than assuming the English position carries across the border. And any club with a specific legal question should ask a solicitor rather than a governing body: a governing body publishes guidance for its members, not legal advice on an individual case, and it is not in a position to tell you where your club stands.

A blanket ban against a considered restriction

The distinction that matters most in practice is between a restriction that has been thought about and one that has simply always been there. A blanket ban is a rule with no reasoning attached, applied to everybody regardless of circumstance, usually inherited and rarely revisited. It is the position hardest to explain when somebody asks why, and the position most likely to produce a complaint that the club cannot answer.

A considered restriction looks quite different on paper even when it produces the same answer on a given day. It states what the restriction is, why it exists, what evidence or advice it rests on, what alternatives were considered and rejected, how a golfer can ask for it to be applied differently in their case, and when it will be looked at again. That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is the difference between a decision and a habit.

Where a restriction genuinely has to stand, say so honestly rather than pretending to a flexibility that does not exist. A course with a stretch no vehicle can cross safely is entitled to say that plainly, and most golfers accept a clear reason far more readily than a vague maybe. What a club should not do is leave somebody to discover the restriction at the first tee.

• What the restriction is, in plain terms a visitor can follow.
• Why it exists, with the ground, safety or capacity reason stated.
• What alternatives the committee considered and why they were not adopted.
• How an individual asks for their circumstances to be taken into account.
• Who decides, in what timescale, and how the answer is given.
• When the restriction is next reviewed, and by whom.

Making the access route visible

A route nobody can find does not count as access. Put the arrangement on the public part of the website next to the visitor information, so that somebody deciding whether to book a round can see the position before they travel. Name the contact by role, say what to send, and give an honest indication of how long a decision takes. A slow answer given honestly beats a fast one that turns out to be provisional.

Brief the staff who will be asked first. In most clubs the first mention will be at the professional's shop or on the phone to the office, and the person answering needs to know one thing above all: not to decide it there. Their job is to pass it to the named contact quickly and to avoid saying anything that sounds like a refusal.

Then close the loop by telling the golfer what happens next. Confirm in writing what has been agreed, what it covers, whether it applies on competition days, and what happens when the course is restricted for everybody. Most of the friction in this area comes from an arrangement that was agreed verbally two seasons ago and remembered differently on both sides.

Handling the evidence and the information it contains

Ask for the minimum that lets you decide. In most cases that is confirmation from a suitable professional that the golfer cannot walk the course, which is a functional statement rather than a diagnosis. A club has no need to know what somebody has been diagnosed with, and asking anyway tends to produce sensitive information that the club then has to store, restrict and eventually dispose of properly.

Health information is treated as a special category under data protection law, so decide before you invite requests where it will be kept, who can see it and how long it is held. In a small club that usually means a locked file or a restricted folder, one named person with access, and a note in the policy saying so. If nobody at the club handles data protection, that is worth sorting before this section is written rather than after.

Be even handed about who is asked for evidence. A club that requires a letter from one member and takes another member's word for it has created exactly the inconsistency the policy was meant to remove. That is also the kind of thing a membership notices long before a committee does, and it is remembered for years after the individual decisions have been forgotten.

Where course conditions genuinely bite

Nothing in an access policy makes wet ground carry a vehicle. When a course is closed to buggies because the soil will shear and rut, that applies to the fleet, to private buggies and to a golfer with an access arrangement alike, because it is a statement about the ground rather than about any person. Being clear about this in advance saves an unpleasant conversation on a Saturday morning.

What a club should do is decide in advance whether anything sits between fully open and fully closed. On many courses a single vehicle kept to made paths does little harm on a day when a full fleet would do a lot, and a club that has thought about that has an answer available rather than a flat no. Where the ground rules it out entirely, say so and say why.

Write the interaction into both documents so they cannot contradict each other. The conditions section of the buggy policy should say what happens to access arrangements, and any arrangement given to an individual should repeat it in the same words, so that nobody ends up comparing two versions of the club's position. Our guide on wet weather bans covers how the underlying ground decision is actually made.

Getting it through the committee and keeping it current

Take the draft through the committee properly and minute it. A policy that can be shown to have been considered, with the guidance and the reasoning recorded, is in a completely different position from one that appeared on the website. It also protects the volunteers who made the decision, since a minuted committee decision is the club's rather than any individual's.

Tell your insurer what you have adopted, particularly anything covering private buggies, who may drive and access arrangements on competition days, since those are the areas where cover carries conditions. Brief the staff who will be applying it, ideally before the season rather than during it. Then diarise the review, because governing body guidance is revised and a club that reads it once ends up with a policy that ages quietly.

Where the questions get harder than a committee can settle, the authoritative answers belong elsewhere: England Golf and your county association for the guidance itself, your broker for what the cover actually permits, the Equality and Human Rights Commission for the statutory codes on the duties, and a solicitor for your club's own position in a specific case. Committee memory is not on that list.

Common questions

Does England Golf require clubs to let members use buggies?

We do not paraphrase the published policy here, because it is revised and a summary goes stale. Read the current document from England Golf directly. What is stable is the frame around it: guidance sets the expectation, equality law sets the duty to make reasonable adjustments, and your club writes a policy that sits consistently with both.

Is a club allowed to ban buggies completely?

Closing a course to buggies because of ground conditions is a normal decision and applies to everybody. A permanent ban is a different thing and needs reasoning that stands up, since equality duties still apply to golfers who cannot walk the course. If your club is considering one, take advice on the specific position rather than relying on precedent.

Do we have to allow a member to bring their own buggy?

That is your club's decision, and plenty of clubs restrict the course to their own fleet for insurance and control reasons. Decide it in advance, write it down and think about the case where a golfer's own vehicle is adapted to them, since that is where a general rule can produce an outcome the committee did not intend.

What evidence can a club ask for before granting buggy access?

Enough to establish that walking the course is not possible, which is usually a letter from a suitable professional confirming that fact. You do not need a diagnosis and are better off not holding one. Apply the same requirement to every request, keep whatever you receive securely, and say in the policy who can see it.

Who at the club should handle buggy access requests?

One named role, normally the secretary or general manager, rather than the counter. It keeps sensitive information out of a public conversation, produces consistent answers and gives the golfer somebody to follow up with. Shop and office staff need to know only how to pass a request on quickly without giving an answer of their own.

Where can a club get advice it can rely on?

England Golf and your county association for the current guidance, your broker or insurer for what the cover permits, the Equality and Human Rights Commission for the statutory codes on reasonable adjustments, and a solicitor for anything specific to your club. Committee memory and what a neighbouring club does are not sources, however confidently they are offered.