I am still trying to disentangle the governmemt advice as it refers to Club Huts and note the advice from BMC, which refers to the government advice:
HMG Advice on the use of ?Hostels? as it affects club huts
The current recommendation is still:
Closing other shared facilities:
? communal kitchens, where guests prepare their own food
? other communal areas (e.g. TV rooms) where social distancing can?t be managed within current government guidelines.
This is the advice on the government website for the use of ?hostels?, i.e. bunkhouses, privately owned hostels (such as Club Huts), etc.
There is also advice on the use of toilets, showers, etc. being allocated to one group only if groups are sharing the accommodation. So if more than one group is present, each separate group must have their own toilet/washroom/shower allocated to them - there must be no sharing of these facilities between groups.
This is from the detailed BMC Guidelines on re-opening Club Huts which links to the government website giving advice on ?accommodation?.
How this can be managed depends on the layout of the facilities at the Hut, so it may be possible to have more than one group in at a time but most Club Huts only have one kitchen. So you can allow your own members to stay if they are pre-booked and there are not more than 6 in the group and provided that there are suitable sanitizing and disinfectant supplies available. Most clubs can't afford to bring in professional cleaning services so have to rely on their members to clean properly after their stay but if they also allow 72 hours between bookings this seems to work OK.
The rules keep changing and it's very difficult to keep up, plus the risk of a regional lock-down now looms, but we do want to get our Club Huts open as much as we can so that people who don't live in a caving area at least have a chance to go caving in a small group. It would be good if we had some definitive advice on allowing visitors to use the Club Hut as well.