Damon Powell

Chair of Scottish Mountain Rescue (SMR)

More than 850 team members volunteer for SMR, undertaking call-outs in some of the most remote locations and challenging conditions in the UK. On average, team members also fund about one fifth of the rescues they undertake, with one fifth coming from the Scottish Government and the remainder from public donations. scottishmountainrescue.org

“Why isn’t Mountain Rescue professional in the UK? Demographics, climate and geography is probably the quickest way to sum it up.

“Because of our climate and weather, you can’t deploy helicopters in Scotland to anywhere near the same extent that you can in the Alps, where they have a professional service. That immediately makes rescue much more labour intensive: a big stretcher carry-out in Scotland takes 20-30 people, rather than a small helicopter team of four people. You’ve also got the challenge of getting people there quickly because the helicopter can’t just swoop in from 30 miles away. If you want a reasonably quick response, you need a good spread of people located close to the hills, so here the cost of professional teams becomes exorbitant.

“Alpine countries also tend to have bigger populations living in mountain areas and an awful lot of people active in the hills, so their teams are densely packed and often busy. Scotland is covered by 32 teams in 26 rescue regions and it would be hard to amalgamate many of those and still provide a sustainable, quick response. If you tried to run it off two or three pro teams, their knowledge of the hills would be nowhere near the level of local knowledge that the teams currently have. There’s also a depth of skill that you couldn’t get in a professional setting. We couldn’t afford the quality of doctors, surgeons and consultants that we get access to in a volunteer capacity.

“You want people to call as soon as they think they need you. If they’re worried for any reason, whether they think they’ll have to pay or they’re not insured, the evidence is that they tend to delay calling you out and that has two knock-on effects: it puts them at greater risk; and it quite often makes the rescue bigger and more risky. It pushes it into the dark, into worse weather, the casualty is potentially more injured and cold before they make that decision. The cleaner you can keep the message that rescue is free, the simpler and cheaper those rescues are.

“The other issue is that a lot of people in the UK wouldn’t consider themselves hillwalkers or climbers – they just go on a walk while they’re on holiday – so the chances of them being insured is low.

“Originally, in Scotland, the local police station managed the rescue with the local PC and doctor rounding up a few stalkers, shepherds and maybe climbers. They didn’t have the officer numbers in the Highlands, so over time volunteer teams grew up around it. You could argue that it developed that way as it was the most practical and functional way, and it does have huge advantages.”