School of Emergent Priorities researchers read 4,187 clauses off the signs bolted to council pool gates, car parks and skate parks, and find the wording follows a scheme template and a circulated claims digest rather than anything that happened at the gate.
Four hundred and twelve signs across 19 councils, with every clause traced back to the template revision or the insurance claim it came from
The laminated notice at a council pool gate is usually read backwards, as a list of things that once went wrong there. Everyone Else’s Accidents, published today by the School of Emergent Priorities, tests that reading against the records and does not find it.
The paper photographs and transcribes 412 conditions-of-entry signs at aquatic centres, showgrounds, community halls, skate parks, sportsground pavilions and off-street car parks across 19 councils, segments them into 4,187 clauses, and matches each clause to fourteen years of template bulletins issued by the councils’ shared liability scheme and to the digest of claims that scheme circulates to its members. More than three-quarters of the clauses reproduce a template revision. Under four per cent were written locally. The odds that a site carries a clause given a matching incident at that site are reported as 1.06, which the authors describe as indistinguishable from no association at all.
Every clause on that sign is somebody’s accident. Almost none of them are yours, and the sign has no way of telling you which.
— Dr Fenna Okoro, Convenor of the Horizon Register
The work extends a line the University has been assembling quietly for some time, on the distance between a document’s wording and the place it is fixed to. Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, said the School had been “usefully unsettled” by how well the apparatus performs when judged against what it sets out to do, adding that the questions the paper leaves open are “the ones worth having”.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.69uloo.