Clubs taking part in The Herald Scottish Golf Survey which collect fees on behalf of Scottish Golf gave the organisation an average score of 5.9 out of 10 when asked to rate the support and service provided, with one of the recurring criticisms being the lack of what is referred to as a “one player, one fee” approach.
Because Scottish Golf only holds information on players who have an official handicap, it relies on individual clubs to report their adult membership numbers when annually assessing how much each club should collect in affiliation fees. This includes full adult playing members who are not in the WHS database maintained in this country by Scottish Golf, which would otherwise be unaware of players that do not have a handicap.
On a practical level, this means that golfers who are members of multiple clubs pay the fee twice or more over, as each club must collect the fee for every adult playing member.
“It’s one of the main gripes among players that are fortunate enough to be a member of more than one golf club,” said Christopher Spencer of the Club Management Association of Europe. “It’s something that has been raised with Scottish Golf a number of times.”
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Scottish Golf chief executive Robbie Clyde says the organisation is “absolutely not against” moving towards one affiliation fee per golfer, but for this to happen all clubs must provide additional information about whether their members are also members of other clubs. In many instances this involves getting permission from third party operators of various management systems used by different clubs.
“We need the data and we need accurate data because if we were to move to a model where it was based on an individual paying one affiliation fee, or for their primary club paying their affiliation fee on the basis of being their primary club, inevitably the number of individual affiliations would decrease and that ultimately could put significant pressure on Scottish Golf,” Mr Clyde said.
“We think, and I stress that ‘we think’ – we’ve done some internal modelling with the numbers that we do have, but that really only represents about 40% of clubs – but we think that as many as 20% of golfers are members of more than one club.
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“So if we were to take that 20% figure as a finger in the air, that could have an impact of a 20% reduction in Scottish Golf’s income and therefore would obviously either reduce the services that we provide, or we would need to increase the affiliation fee to effectively compensate for that.”
Affiliation fees from more than 185,000 club members account for nearly 65%, or about £2 million, of Scottish Golf’s annual income. Assuming a 20% reduction in the number of individual fees paid, the charge would need to go up by roughly £2.75 or 16% annually per club member to make up the shortfall.