How can i get my chickens to lay often?

[horseebudgie]

My brother has had chickens for about 2 years now and we know plenty about chickens and even hatched some of our own this year. But we always struggle with our egg production, i know in summer they are longer days so we got about 8 eggs a day but that only happened for a few weeks and that is about the only time we get eggs. Just before the summer holidays we got about 15 hens from a friend, we had hybrids and a few other types to try them out but not one of them gave a single egg and neither did our original hens. Since then we still haven't got any eggs, our friend always gets eggs all year round and if anyone has seen Edwardian Farm on BBC 2 where one of the guys got Light Sussex hens he got baskets full of eggs all year round. We do give them 3 types of feed for them to eat and at the moment we have a heat lamp to keep them warm as we live in scotland and it is winter and we also have a light but at the moment we do not use that as much.

So if someone could help me by giving some good advice which i don't already know that will be good.