Insurance will quickly come up if you ask a UK fairground operator what keeps them up at nite. Not the staff, not the weather, not the rides. insurance. Since before the pandemic, premiums have been rising; experts in the leisure industry predict increases of at least 30 to 50 percent over the last five or six years. Additionally, a number of businesses that previously underwrote fairground public liability have either reduced their capacity or completely left the market. The number of willing insurers has decreased. The others are posing more challenging queries prior to quoting.
In this case, NAFLIC and the ADIPS framework offer a documented response to those more difficult questions. An operator who can show current, ongoing compliance—rides inspected by qualified inspection bodies on the ADIPS register, Declarations of Operational Compliance on file, maintenance records kept in compliance with HSE HSG175, adherence to BS EN 13814—arrives at an underwriting discussion with something an unregistered operator lacks: independently verifiable proof of due diligence. The rides themselves are not being evaluated by insurers. They are evaluating the likelihood of a claim occurring and, in the event that it does, whether the operator adhered to a recognized and defendable safety procedure. Both questions are simultaneously addressed by certification and documentation.
In order to perform competence-verified ride inspections, the ADIPS system operates thru Registered Inspection Bodies, which are independent organizations authorized by UKAS under ISO/IEC 17020. A Declaration of Operational Compliance, which is issued when an inspector from a registered body approves a ride, tells an underwriter that the equipment has been physically inspected by a qualified individual with verified credentials in accordance with a recognized standard and is deemed fit to operate. The option accessible to operators who stay outside the framework is an operator’s own word that their rides are adequately maintained, which falls into a different type of assurance.
Early in 2025, when ADIPS suspended DMG Technical Limited, the inspection company whose principal, David Geary, had collected convictions and warnings relating to inspection failures, the significance of that evidence became unusually apparent. 87 ride designs that his company had approved were reviewed as a result of the suspension. At parks where his Declarations of Operational Compliance were deemed invalid, HSE issued Stop Operation Orders. This meant that the parks were temporarily unable to operate those rides, not because there was a problem with the rides per se, but rather because the documentation supporting their compliance was no longer reliable. The operators who were put in that situation quickly discovered that the caliber of the inspection body is just as important as the inspection itself. The purpose of NAFLIC’s assistance in upholding quality standards throughout the inspection body community is to stop this kind of cascade issue.
Even tho the underlying systems are complex, the insurance math isn’t. An operator’s risk profile is quantifiably lower than that of an operator without a clean inspection history, current DOCs, and documented maintenance records. This results in improved market access, more willing insurers to quote, and more favorable premium calculations from those willing insurers. The distinction between being inside and outside the ADIPS framework in a market that has been shrinking and hardening is becoming more and more important in determining whether or not one can acquire affordable insurance.
Despite the well-known exception of DMG Technical, the 2025 ADIPS Inspection Body Conference at Drayton Manor revealed that 89 percent of the 49 inspection body audits performed received exemplary scores. This indicates that quality oversight within the registered body community is generally operating well. After the Chester-le-Street deaths in 2006, NAFLIC Technical Bulletin 313 started a discourse about inflatable safety, which PIPA expressly addressed. These are not distinct discussions. They are a part of a single system that aims to increase the reliability of the inspection regime for all types of equipment.
