Can i please ask if there are club disclaimers available to non insured cavers?
I actually have insurance, but a couple of well experienced cavers i know dont and cant afford it. is there a way forward for them?

What do you mean by disclaimers?
Are they members?
Why do they need insurance?
Is the club insured?

You cannot stop some one suing you which is what insurance is mostly about.  (Though in truth the best defence against being sued is not having any money.  So as happened many years ago to one caving club, if the person who injured someone is penniless, then the injured person will go after those who have money within the club.  They settled out of court in private so we never learnt the details.) 

You cannot completely give up your right to sue anyone in part because of the Unfair Contract Terms Act of 1977 and also you can't dictate to your heirs to not sue for the loss consequential on your death.

BCA adopted the position for insuring clubs because of the way the law applies to unincorporated groups which is what most clubs are.  The effect of the legal position is that every member of the club has to be insured in order to cover the whole club. 

Also a number of access agreements require the caver to be insured just to minimise the potential of the land owner being in line to be sued. 

Good summary, Bob. 

they are not club affiliated, but have caved extensively with many different clubs and their members. The problem they have is mainly about affording the insurance, let alone club membership.
The guys im talking about only wish to accompany cavers on a led basis but cannot do many caves due to the insurance required.
Their circumstances do not afford them the ability to pay for this insurance, and although they are well aware of the reasons why insurance is required the question remains, is there a disclaimer they can sign to waver their right to claim if an accident occurred.

Further clarification may help: at present it appears that the situation is this:

You've got a club which organises trips
Non-members who are uninsured routinely join in on trips

If this is the case then the following observations arise (subject to input from an insurance expert):

If a club member gets injured as a result of negligence by an uninsured non-member there's no recourse* to a tidy sum to help with the aftermath, e.g. if the club member becomes paralysed his family will potentially be left destitute. (* Other than to pursue the club itself for recompense for negligence by allowing uninsured non-members to participate, perhaps).

If a non-club member gets injured as a result of negligence by an insured member then they'd perhaps get a pay out from insurers.

If a non-club member gets injured as a result of negligence by an uninsured non-member, because they were joining in on a club-organised trip they'd perhaps get a pay out from the club, or its officers.

If this is an accurate summary of affairs then it would appear that your club is taking a risk that it might have to pick up the pieces in the event of one of these uninsured non-members making a mistake whereas the uninsured non-members are nicely covered, courtesy of your club or its officers, in other scenarios.

If membership and/or insurance is a stipulation of access then by allowing hangers on, the club also appears to be failing to observe protocol in that regard. 

Also it's probably fair to say that, if this is a reasonable summary of the circumstances, your club is habitually engaged in neglecting its duty of care to its paid up members.

Perhaps the club and its officers should guard against the risk of claims against them by the simple expedient of paying for the impoverished keenies to become BCA members and provide them with free membership; it could be much cheaper doing this than just crossing your fingers.

thenuttygang said:

is there a disclaimer they can sign to waver their right to claim if an accident occurred.

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The BCA insurance isn't so much about their right to make a claim, it's about protection if other people make a claim against the group caving.

As I understand it (and subject to correction by someone who understands the BCA insurance well), the club is covered only if all the members are covered. (There is a 17 day temporary membership for potential new members). The presence of your uninsured friends would potentially have the effect, in the event of a claim (by landowner, member of the public, other member of the club), of the insurance company not honouring the claim because the club had breached the terms and conditions by not having all the participants insured. The fact that the uninsured participants had agreed not to make a claim themselves is totally irrelevant.

The only waiver that would make any sense in this scenario is for your friends to indemnify the club for the full costs of any claim against the club  :tease:

kay said:

The only waiver that would make any sense in this scenario is for your friends to indemnify the club for the full costs of any claim against the club  :tease:

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A waiver which would not be binding on their relatives should any incident be of a terminal nature.

BCA insurance + club membership is about 4 gallons of petrol.

If these people are 'experienced' how much do they spend on petrol getting to the caves? Miss out on a couple of trips and you've paid the club fees/insurance. Job done.

BCA individual, I believe would work out at approx 0.05p per day,

Whilst I have my own feelings on whether BCA insurance/club membership is prohibitively  expensive...
(It isn't...just for clarification)
Surely the easy answer to this question is....why the f*** are you posting this question on UK caving!!!!!
Surely if you cave with mates...some of whom don't have BCA insurance and you go on a trip which requires BCA insurance for the key...then the BCA members go on the trip....and "OH MY GOD" who are these infidels following us into the cave!
I'll be honest....something that seems sadly lacking here...I've done a trip in Derbyshire which required registering names of attendees before going underground....when we did the trip...a close friend who'd been out the country for ages turned up and asked what we were doing...someone officious turned up and reminded us that no-one whose name wasn't recorded in advance could go on that trip and they'd have to go on an un-monitored trip nearby instead....we had three options...cave without friend we'd not seen for ages....go off and do a completely different trip...foresaking the trip we'd waited ages to do after jumping through the required access hoops....or give the bird to the jobsworth who bothered us with the mindnumbingly petty rules and do the trip anyway....
Obviously we chose option 1 knowing that without the magic aura of their name on a sheet of paper...straws would instantly fall from the ceiling and mud would leap onto flowstone in their prescence...something that the rest of us would have avoided thanks to our "colgate ring of permit confidence"....

We should bear in mind that in many situations the duty of care will be focused on one person (sometimes possibly more than one).  If you are the most experienced caver in the party, or the designated trip leader, then you are more likely to be held to account.  We should  perhaps reflect on the fact that most individuals going underground are NOT insured.  Outdoor centres, commercial operators and organisations like scouts insure only their staff (or voluntary leaders), they do not insure their individual participants.  There is none of the 'caver to caver' cover that we consider necessary, because any litigation is almost certain to be directed at the organisation. 

A fair point, Andy. people frequently forget that this is PI insurance (or whatever the commercial equivalent is called these days) it is highly unlikely that the clients of these organisations would be deemed to be negligent while caving 'cos the courts would (probably) decide that anything and everything they did should be under the watchful eye - and control - of the leaders concerned. However, the cavers concerned in the OP are deemed to be 'well experienced' and presumably thus capable of taking responsibility for their own actions.

It should be noted that actually very few caves in the UK require insurance cover. I know at least one case where the view is taken that this is purely the responsibility of the cavers, if they are uninsured and negligent then, hey, they'll get sued anyway & lose their house. No assets, OK, then they'll be bankrupt forever & will never get one, not until the debt is paid off anyway. However long that takes.

Trying to sort out an insurance issue and been reading the comments above which are confusing me futher. Got a club trip coming up which only a couple of members can make but one wants to bring a mate. Requirement is for suitable insurance such as BCA so if the club members have bca insurance and the guest has other suitable insurance is there a problem with the club bca insurance due to not everyone in the party having bca insurance.
  The other issue is suitable insurance, I guess this means scout association insurance for example but does this also include the type of personal liability insurance that is covered by home insurance? (assuming the individual insurance provider doesn't ban caving)
thanks for any clarifacation

To get the definitive answer I would contact BCA's Insurance Manager (contact details on the BCA web site) He probably won't thank me for referring people, but if you explain the details he will give you a definitive answer... 

bazdog said:

Trying to sort out an insurance issue and been reading the comments above which are confusing me futher. Got a club trip coming up which only a couple of members can make but one wants to bring a mate. Requirement is for suitable insurance such as BCA so if the club members have bca insurance and the guest has other suitable insurance is there a problem with the club bca insurance due to not everyone in the party having bca insurance.
  The other issue is suitable insurance, I guess this means scout association insurance for example but does this also include the type of personal liability insurance that is covered by home insurance? (assuming the individual insurance provider doesn't ban caving)
thanks for any clarifacation

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I don't often use emoticons but...      Guests on club trips (especially novices) really don't need to be insured.  It's NOT going to invalidate your club BCA insurance.  Club caving is going to drown in a morass of bureaucracy and ill-founded paranoia if we're not careful. 

I'll add something to that....  We crawl through unstable boulder chokes, traverse unprotected across greasy holes, force virgin crawls headfirst..... and what is it we worry about?  The hypothetical negligible risk that we might get sued? 

Thanks Les, trip is soon so wasn't sure if I could get an official answer in time but just been looking on the website and it does answer one and a half of my questions  :-\

Personally I don't lay awake at night worring about my insurance liability but I am more concerned with following the required access conditions (part of another thread maybe?) and making sure the club is doing the right thing. I hadn't thought about it before but some of the things on this thread and the bca faq has made me think of what would happen if it did all go wrong (however unlikely that may be)

I don't often use emoticons but...      Guests on club trips (especially novices) really don't need to be insured.  It's NOT going to invalidate your club BCA insurance.  Club caving is going to drown in a morass of bureaucracy and ill-founded paranoia if we're not careful.
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This is the half answered question and as I say i've never been worried about it before until I suddenly find myself leader of a trip and all the people who know about this stuff have buggered off on holiday. As I now find myself representing the club and being 'in charge' I just want to make sure I am doing it correctly for everyone involved.

Does the caving member?s cover only apply to official club trips, or to trips which only have other members of my club on it?



A:
The caving member?s cover applies whoever you go caving with, but if other members of the same trip do not have caving cover, then you may be more at risk of an uninsured claim than you would otherwise be. The safest position to be in is to ensure that all other members of your caving trip are caving members of the BCA scheme.

Andy Sparrow said:

It's NOT going to invalidate your club BCA insurance.  Club caving is going to drown in a morass of bureaucracy and ill-founded paranoia if we're not careful.

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I think you are wrong Andy.  As Kay has already said if a guest on a club trip is not covered, then the insurance company is likely to refuse to cover the club.  BCA as made it perfectly clear that all club members have to be members of BCA and thus insured, for the club to be insured.  But see FAQs 55, 56 & 57 at http://british-caving.org.uk/membership/08D1633_FAQ_2008.pdf for details.  It is not that arduous to get cover for temporary members presuming you can speak, hear and write (which in your case Andy I know you can) but I am going to let anyone interested look up what to do.