“If everything else fails, read the instructions”

I have always been a believer in reading the instructions before I start trying to do something. I often upbraid others for wasting time fiddling with things for hours, then having to eventually resort to reading the instructions and discovering that what they were trying to do is either A impossible or B a 5 second process by simply pressing the correct series of buttons.

Well I have to admit that I have fallen foul of my own rules. During the course of last year we attended a large number of events in central London. Quite often with 2 vehicles, and on one particularly busy day we had a total of 5 vans and cars there. This has been for anything from one large event to upto five smaller events on the same day. Now central London is covered by the London Congestion Charge, and its my responsibility to register the vehicles for this and pay the required charges. Usually I manage it O.K., however on a number of occasions I have ended up with PCN's (Penalty Charge Notices). At the last count, along with parking fines and one tow away fee it added up to a shade over £800, none of which is tax deductible. The usual sequence of events is that due to the amount of events we are involved with, we set off mega early for the capital and I suddenly realise that I have not paid the congestion charges. I then resolve that I will do it the next morning without fail. We then carry out the one two, three or more events over the course of the day, arriving back home at perhaps 5AM. We then have two or three hours sleep, before jumping up and setting off to another part of the country for that days events, and I plain forget to pay our dues. Prompt a week later when a demand (or possibly more than one) drop thorough our letterbox.

Well I looked into the Transport for London site yesterday, and discovered that if I register our vehicles as a fleet, it insures me from receiving PCN charges, as every time we travel into London our number triggers an invoice that is sent out for that vehicle, brilliant! We have to register a minimum of ten vehicles at £10 each, which is less than the fine for two PCN's. Added to the fact that we have just accepted our 67th booking for this season (and we haven't reached April/May yet which is usually when we receive well over 50% of our bookings), over 25% of which are in London, and I could quite possibly have just presented a sizable fine from adding up over the season.

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We are pleased to announce that under the local authorities health and hygiene inspection procedure, called Scores On The Doors, we have just been awarded 5 stars for our catering operations. You are allowed one minor failing under the 5 star rating, but I am glad to say we got the perfect score with no faults at all. This makes all the hard work and rigorous quality control procedures worthwhile.

In line with our health and safety policies I have just arranged for a number of additional staff to take first aid courses in early April, and I intend to have everyone trained as fire marshal's before the start of the main season. We have added a number of extra fire extinguishers to our pool, consisting of small 1 or 2 kg dry powder devices, designed to be stored on our carts and mini stalls, larger 6kg dry powder extinguishers for use in our central pool, (the idea is the small device is used to fight the fire initially, gaining time for our safety officers to move the larger devices to the point of the fire). We also added wet chemical extinguishers specifically for attractions such as the doughnut cart which uses large quantities of hot cooking oil.

Our safety paperwork has also grown, we now have around 90 pages of safety related data, before we add the individual risk assessments and insurance documents. Luckily virtually all of our clients now accept this data as either a pdf file or supplied on cd, so we are managing to keep within our environmental policies.

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Our small Victorian style side stalls have turned out to be one of our most versatile and popular additions to our portfolio of attractions. This was proven again today when we attended an event taking place in South Shields. It was organised by a North East events management company that we have worked for on a number of projects. Anyway, this particular one we were asked to provide a stall to fit in with the theme of healthy hearts. The budget we were allocated was pretty small, but nevertheless we still managed to have custom printed banner across the back of the stall. We also changed one of our coconut shy games into a knock the heart off (using softer balls than we would with the coconuts). Everything worked well and we had an enjoyable visit back to my native North East.

After the event finished we called in at a new Valentines funfair. Arthur was there with a couple of items of equipment. Business was steady, but there is still time for it to improve. The event itself looked well, with fencing around the complete site, an impressive entrance gate and a good selection of attractions from around the country. I hope it does well as it will benefit the business as a whole to have new events coming online, but I really think that this could be a summer that see things tight right the way through.



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The announcement we made in an earlier post was the first result to emerge from our new SINAS initiative. This scheme (Safety Is No Accident Scheme) is a complete review of all of the safety systems connected with operating our equipment both at funfair and in the corporate events market. The idea is to take the best approach from each of these industries, and create a hybrid scheme for our own business that is safer than either industry. We have a mini website at S.I.N.A.S which will chart the ongoing evaluation of every aspect of our operations.

What we plan to do is introduce new safer working practices as and when we find them, rather that waiting until the end of the whole process and then trying to introduce everything at once. The decision to subject all of our attractions and additionally the power supply cables to quarterly PAT testing was as a direct result of this scheme and we now have a number of personnel qualified to undertake the testing, along with specially purchased PAT and RCD testing equipment.

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The safety initiative we launched recently has been extremely well received within the events industry. Admittedly it has increased our workload somewhat, especially on the paperwork side, I am just finishing the safety documents for an event we are attending with a single cart, and it runs to 84 pages! Luckily virtually everyone accepts our documents in PDF format so we can adhere to our environmental policy as well as our safety policy.

Safety has been in the news recently with the story about the prosecution of Brouhaha International and Maurice Agis over the Dreamscape disaster at Chester Le Streets Riverside Park in 2007. This was when a giant inflatable sculpture blew away in the wind tragically killing two women and injuring some 13 other people. Now this was a tragedy by any measure, and the funfair industry has felt the backlash of it with the canceling of a number of long established events which were usually held in the same park. One of which happened to be an event we supply attractions to, so we felt the effects directly.

THe thing which is annoying, is the fact that we are now preparing and presenting 84 pages of safety data for a single Ice Cream cart at an event indoors. Not only that but we are having to adhere to the guidelines and strictures contained in those 84 pages, for something which is pretty safe by any standards. So why the hell was a structure the size of a football field, which was made to contain dozens of people at a time not subject to similarly stringent safety regs. To be honest its something that has annoyed me ever since we started working in the corporate events arena. We regularly come across inflatable structures that aren't anchored down, that are powered using petrol generators which are refilled whilst they are running. Many inflatables are delivered in the back of a transit van, plugged in to the power using 13amp household plugs which are not meant to be used outdoors, inflated, then the guy delivering it cheerily waves goodbye and rolls up 6 hours later to collect it. How does he know the people he has left it with are competent to operate it. What happens if it rains on his non waterproof plugs, and one day someone is going to be filling the petrol generator when it bursts into flames, I have a vision of the blower used to keep the structure inflated, sucking these flames inside the structure and giving us a low budget remake of towering inferno.

Why when the funfair industry is being regulated ever more stringently (even though we have one of the best safety records of any industry) does other industries seem to have little or no regulation at all. We have hired numerous inflatables from companies to complement our own when we have busy periods, and only once have we been handed a safety document. Even then it was a case of "Sign this mate so we aren't blamed for any accidents", rather than a genuine attempt to ensure we were capable operators. The end results of allowing amateurs to operate at outdoor events is exactly what we seen at Chester Le Street, the local authority answer to the catalogue of cock ups, is to prevent funfairs operating at the venue, even though they have been doing so without mishap for generations. Perhaps if one of these endless risk assessments we are forever filling in was applied to the Dreamscape structure, someone might have realised that it wasn't safe in the wind.

The motto we have adopted with the first of our new range of safety policies is "Safety Is No Accident".

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