Between the sound of a roller coaster slowing down and the smell of fried food, there is a group of people that most people who visit fairgrounds have never heard of, never considered asking about, and most likely never will. The Fairgrounds Joint Advisory Committee, also referred to as the FJAC in regulatory circles, spent more than 25 years developing the safety standards that determined whether the ride your child just climbed onto was actually safe or just appeared to be. It’s the kind of organization that only comes to the public’s notice when something goes horribly wrong.
Indeed, things went wrong. Megan Wilcox, a seven-year-old girl, passed away on September 5, 2003, close to a slide at the Wonderland pleasure park in Farnsfield, Nottinghamshire. Why weren’t trained first aiders required to be present at a park full of kids? was the question that her mother Kerry and stepfather Wayne were left with, and it should have had an obvious answer. It turned out that the truthful response was nuanced. Employers were legally required to administer first aid to their workers under the current regulations, but not to members of the public passing through the gates. Part of the purpose of the FJAC was to close these kinds of gaps. The question of whether it moved quickly enough is a whole other story.
The committee was formed as a cooperative body between the Health and Safety Executive and the fairground industry, based on a concept that seemed reasonable on paper: bring together the regulators, the people who build the rides, and the people who inspect them, and let them determine what is safe. In 1984, a Code of Safe Practice at Fairs was established. With numerous editions and hundreds of pages of technical information, HSG 175, the HSE’s guidance document on fairgrounds and amusement parks, became the industry standard. Britain’s traveling fairs and fixed-site parks might have functioned in something akin to a regulatory void in the absence of this framework.
The FJAC was unique and perhaps underappreciated because it functioned mostly in secret. There were no headlines about it. Press conferences regarding maturity risk assessments were nonexistent. There were occasional glimpses of it in Parliament. In a 2005 debate, Graham Allen, MP for Nottingham North, brought up the committee directly and urged the government to use the FJAC’s upcoming revision of HSG 175 to force stronger first aid provisions. The discussion was focused and sincere. There was hardly any splash.
The actual functioning of advisory committees such as this one is tense. Because they rely on industry collaboration, they are constantly in contact with the people they are supposed to hold responsible. Depending on the year and the particular issue, that may have resulted in either comfortable compromises or significant standards. The third edition of HSG 175, which was released in 2017, included revised guidelines on maturity risk assessments as well as more lucid language throughout—small, carefully worded improvements. The reason you trust this type of document is that it doesn’t overpromote itself.
The amount of quiet work that goes into averting tragedies that never make the news is difficult to ignore. Numerous decisions made years ago in committee rooms, working groups, and the tiresome back-and-forth of draft documents are represented by every uneventful summer weekend at a fairground. That work was done by the FJAC. It was not given the credit it deserved. Additionally, it’s likely that the families who never had to inquire about the whereabouts of the first responders were unaware that they had a little-known advisory committee to thank.
