At the 2012 AGM it was erroneously claimed that our unincorporated Chamois Mountaineering Club needed to become a Mutual Society for the following three reasons:
The undisputable proof that our Club had absolutely nothing to gain from becoming a Mutual Society, reproduced below, was web-published in a password-protected secure location for committee eyes only, several months before the 2013 AGM. At no time has anyone even attempted to challenge the veracity of this substantial weight of wholly objective evidence.
I understand that as a direct result of mutualisation our hut's rate bill shot up to £10K per annum. Coincidentally, £10K was what we paid to buy Marconi Hall in the first place, (under my Chairmanship).
The Committee's case for mutualisation has been largely based on the myth that we cannot rely on the BMC Civil Liability insurance to cover all of our potential civil liability risks, even though no evidence has ever been produced to support this contention. Our Club's pro-Mutualisation lobby has been trading solely on groundless fear. So what are the facts?
The BMC has been proudly and publicly boasting for decades that its Civil Liability insurance package provides all BMC members and all BMC Clubs with fully comprehensive civil liability insurance covering all and any risks associated with mountaineering and with the operation of both mountaineering clubs and their mountaineering centres or club huts. Had this been in any way untrue, our fellow clubs would have forced the BMC to back down on this grandiose claim long ago, but it still remains to be challenged; because it cannot be challenged; because it is true!
Let's put it another way. The insurance documentation is legally binding. When it says "any and all" Civil Liabilities relating to mountaineering, what it really means is ANY AND ALL such liabilities. There are no exclusion clauses, no weasel words, no 'ifs' and 'buts'.
We all know that there are a few scoundrels around who will make fraudulent insurance claims. The occasional refusal of the BMC's insurers to settle out-of-court indicates that they suspect fraud or an over-inflated claim, insisting that the plaintiff either pursues their claim in the High Court or withdraws.
The BMC Civil Liability insurance does not cover accidents unrelated to mountaineering, such as the road cycling accident in the Channel Islands that was cited by the pro-Mutualisation lobby. Road traffic, maritime and aeronautical accidents obviously fall well outside the remit of our mountaineering insurance.
On three well-spaced occasions through the summer of 2013 all committee members were politely invited (via committee-members@chamois.org.uk) to provide just one example of an uninsured Civil Liability risk relevant to mountaineering, but not one of them was able to do so. This was because there aren't any. None were revealed to us at the 2013 AGM.
Not one of them ever communicated with me in connection with this.
If you think you know of a civil liability risk that is relevant to mountaineering but which is not covered by our BMC insurance, please reveal it, when it will be checked and the details published here.
All liability insurance policies have a cap on pay-outs, there being no exceptions. Whatever cap is set, however high it is, there will always be a few individuals who express unwarranted concern that it might not be high enough.
It is essential to understand the relationship between 'Consequence' and 'Likelihood'. The case made at the 2013 AGM centred strongly on the potentially dreadful financial consequence if we were to be faced by an award against us of more than the cap. But 'Risk' is the product obtained by multiplying together the 'Consequence' and the 'Likelihood'. If either the likelihood or the consequence is vanishingly small, the other is irrelevant, no matter how high it is. [This is a subject I once taught professionally, see my article on Risk & Safety]. Here is an example to which we can all easily relate. Suppose you are driving at 60mph on a two lane single carriageway road, with oncoming cars being driven towards you at 60mph passing just a couple of metres to your right. We are all familiar with this situation. It would only take a small brief clockwise rotation of the steering wheel at the wrong time to cause a collision with an incoming vehicle with a closing speed of 120mph that could easily kill the occupants of both vehicles. This could quite conceivably happen if we were to be distracted by re-tuning the radio, studying a satnav, or dealing with squabbling children in the back of the car. The 'Consequence' would be catastrophic, but because we all complacently believe the 'Likelihood' to be vanishing small, we all quite readily accept the risk of dying and killing others whilst travelling by car.
The preceding paragraph was written and first published in 2014, more than a year before the collision between the car of Peter and Gill Knowles and a truck on a straight and level two-lane single carriageway on the 2nd of September 2015, yet seems to have been sadly prophetic.
If Andrew was really concerned about avoiding unnecessary risks he wouldn't drive at high speed for mile after mile holding the steering wheel with just its rim between just the thumb and first finger of his right hand, his right elbow sitting on the driver's door arm-rest. He is far from alone, however. The professional PSV driver who conducted us by coach between the Hut and the Royal Victoria Hotel during the 2014 Anniversary Weekend rarely took his left hand off the gear stick, and turned some corners with just the heel of the palm of his right hand touching the rim of the steering wheel. There is no way in which either of them would pass a driving test mishandling the steering wheel like that. Every sentence in this paragraph is a statement of objective fact, not personal criticism.
In the 50-plus years of the CMC, only 3 members have been killed in accidents and only one is wheelchair bound as a result of an accident. All of these accidents were Road Traffic Accidents, which places mountaineering risk in a mountaineering club into its true perspective.
Although the 'Consequence' of a claim exceeding our £10M cap would be financially serious, what is the 'Likelihood' of it ever happening? The answer is that the likelihood is vanishingly small, bordering on impossible. Consider the known facts. We are insured through Perkins Slade, a brokerage firm which has captured the market for our type of insurance within the UK. They provide Civil Liability Insurance for 250 different sports governing bodies and major sports associations, many of whom are very large indeed. One of these 250 is the BMC. The BMC provides this Perkins Slade Civil Liability Insurance for no fewer than 302 Mountaineering Clubs, and we are just one of them. If you multiply together 302 and 250 the product is 75,500. Ever since Perkins Slade has been providing this insurance, their largest-ever historical settlement has been for just £5M, and it was in circumstances that simply cannot be applied to us in our situation anyway. Furthermore, Perkins Slade is currently investigating raising the cap from £10M to £15M. It is impossible to convincingly argue that there is any real likelihood of a claim ever being made against one of our own Club members for more than the insurance cap. The risk is therefore acceptable. The 2013 AGM pro-Mutualisation lobby traded solely on groundless fear, with no attempt being made to quantify the risk.
If you have objective grounds to challenge this conclusion, please share your views so that they mey be published here.
It is claimed that some of our club officials might be at personal financial risk when entering into contracts on the Club's behalf.
It is impossible to prove a negative. All we know for sure is that the entire committee was politely asked on three separate occasions during 2013 to provide just one specific example of circumstances that could possibly result in anyone suffering financially, but not one of them could do so, none were explained to us at the 2013 AGM and none have been suggested since.
Let us try to find such an example. Suppose that the Committee agreed (as indeed it did) that the external cement rendering of the Hut should be professionally painted in 2013, and instructed the Hut Warden (in writing to protect him) to have the work carried out. The Hut Warden chooses a contactor and sets up a contract in his own name. The job is completed and the contractor sends the invoice to the Hut Warden. The Hut Warden signs it off and forwards the invoice to the Treasurer for payment. For the Hut Warden to be at any personal financial risk, the rest of the Committee would have to gang up on him and coerce the Treasurer into refusing to pay. This would simply never happen! If you don't like this example, please come up with a better one and it will be described here, but be aware that no-one on Committee has been able to do so!
Many of our contracts with outside bodies such as with the local council and with public utilities require regular payments, where although the initial contracts would have been set up by one of our very early Hut Wardens, all payments are taken by Direct Debit from the Club's bank account. Mutualisation would provide little in the way of any extra safeguards that would be of any practical use whatsoever. For example, we pay for our phone service by Direct Debit from the Club's bank account, so we clearly need not have waited until we had mutualised before providing a Hut WiFi Hotspot, whether with our existing phone service provider, or with a new one. The delay in providing WiFi was deemed necessary ONLY to help jusify Mutualisation.
A related red herring concerns product warranties, which would still be legally enforceable even if in the name of the individual member who made the purchase on the Club's behalf, rather than in the name of the Club itself.
There is recent evidence that a move might be afoot to turn our Mountaineering Club into a Multi-Activity Club. This might be motivated by a desire to demonstrate that our BMC Civil Liability Insurance, which only covers mountaineering activities, would no longer be adequate, so obviously, we would need to be a Mutual Society, anyway. To prove that you have read this webpage, please be able to quote the name Goliath. Changing the very nature of our long-established Club purely to justify our dreadful and irrevocable Mutualisation mistake would be preposterous.
Since the preceding paragraph was written, it has been brought to my attention that the name of the Club in the official list of BMC-affiliated clubs dated 30th April 2015 is The Chamois Club Ltd, omitting all reference to it being a Mountaineering Club. There is no evidence of this having been agreed by the members. So who took it upon himself to give this name change to the BMC? It is not difficult to guess, is it?
We allegedly needed to mutualise to ensure that any Civil Liability Claims made against individual members could be passed off to the Club, which would then become responsible for meeting them. Andrew has subsequently argued in writing that the Club itself would be fully protected by the BMC Civil Liability Insurance against all such claims that members had passed off to it. Since that is unarguably the case, and both sides agree that is is, then the individual members would also have been equally as well protected by the same insurance against the same claims. Hence mutualisation has now been positively confirmed in writing by Andrew to have been completely unnecessary. Andrew has quite definitely scored an Own Goal!
Someone has already tried to demolish these truths by arguing that since mutualisation has not disadvantaged Mel Owen in any way, he can have no grounds to object.
Someone has already tried to justify mutualisation by arguing the since it was agreed by a majority vote, it must have been a sound decision. Here are some well-known examples of where the majority has not been right:
No, the majority is not always right. .
The Committee, through the Chairman, was invited to answer the following question when they met on the 25th of April 2015: "Does the Committee agree that the Club has gained nothing tangible by becoming a Mutual Society, or is it able to clearly define even just one specific concrete benefit that has made it all worthwhile?
The Committee met on the 25th of April, but ignored this question completely. They are unwilling to admit that mutualisation was unnecessary and yet are unable to claim any tangible benefits.
Return to the top of this page or whence you came