Lloyd Major writes in Event Industry News’ festival and outdoor event guide

Lloyd Major, Founder and CEO of Halo Solutions, has written for Event Industry News’ festival and outdoor event guide on what a legal duty of candour means in practice for the people who run large outdoor events.

The Public Office (Accountability) Bill, widely known as Hillsborough Law, is aimed at public authorities and is currently progressing through the House of Lords. But anyone running a festival or outdoor event alongside local authorities, police, medical providers and a long list of contractors is working right next to it. Lloyd’s argument is that the real test isn’t a legal one. It’s operational.

Three questions (including one most operators can’t answer)

Lloyd boils readiness down to three questions. Can you find out what is happening across your site, right now, in one place? Can you trust what it tells you? And could you prove that to somebody else afterwards? Most operators he speaks to answer yes to the first two without thinking too hard. Far fewer can answer the third.

Outdoor events make that harder than most environments. A festival site brings together security, medical, stewarding, the local authority, police and a string of contractors, often for a handful of days. Each keeps its own version of events: radios here, a WhatsApp group there, a paper log in the production office, somebody’s memory of what was agreed on site. As Lloyd puts it: “None of that is dishonest. It’s just fragile.”

Candour is a habit, not a purchase

The heart of the piece is simple: candour can’t exist without evidence, and evidence can’t be rebuilt once an inquiry has started. Being ready means habits built well in advance. Incidents reported from the ground as they happen, not written up from memory the next morning. Decisions logged in real time by whoever made them. One shared, time-stamped record, rather than a stack of separate logs that only get compared after something has gone wrong.

Why the off-season is the right moment

Most outdoor events are between seasons right now, planning next year’s site rather than running this year’s. Lloyd’s point is that this is the time to agree how incidents get logged and who feeds into the record, not the week before the gates open. “Fix it in the planning room and it’s a habit by the time it matters.”

And, as with most of what Lloyd writes, the piece lands on people rather than systems. Systems don’t make decisions; people do. A reliable operational record protects the people who made the right call under pressure and now need to show their working, whether to a Safety Advisory Group, an insurer, a family or an inquiry.

Read the full article in Event Industry News →

Halo Solutions provides incident management software for festivals, events, venues, stadia and control rooms, bringing incident reporting, tasking and operational records into one place for the teams protecting people on site. If you’re using the off-season to rethink how your event records incidents and decisions, talk to us.