Not published, and saying so
The P&I club comparison tool is one we are building for Gallagher Specialty, and it carries Gallagher's brand. It stands apart from the platform. It reads only published figures, holds no client or renewal data and never touches the book. This entry covers the work on it from 6 to 9 October.
Until 7 October, a figure a club does not publish was left blank. A blank is ambiguous. It can be read as a zero, as a figure we lost, or as a page that did not finish loading. From 7 October the tool says N/P wherever a value would stand: in the tables, the ranked bars, the club profiles, the club list (where it reads "Rank N/P") and the export. Each place says what N/P means. In the business mix charts, a club's year with no figures is drawn as a hatched block labelled N/P, with an "N/P (not published)" key, rather than as an empty space.
We also put a range check on every figure. A combined ratio must fall between 50% and 200%, a rank between 1 and 13, and shares must sum to 100%. A figure that fails is held back and shown as N/P. They have already caught one. A secondary source gave one club a combined ratio of 1.4% for 2021/22. The club's own figure is 94%, and that is the one the tool keeps.
Sources and definitions in one place
A new Data section gathers what stands behind the figures under four tabs.
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Sources, arranged by club, every year, with Expand all
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Notes on the figures, club by club, where the clubs publish on different bases
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Definitions of every metric
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Units and checks, including the range checks above
Each tab ends with a panel on how to report a figure that looks wrong, giving the club, the year, the metric and the figure expected. We would rather be told than stay wrong. The foot of every page now says that the figures are taken from the clubs' published reports and S&P Global Ratings' bulletins, gives the date they were last updated, and says that every source is on the Data page.
None of this makes the figures agreed. They are read by hand from the clubs' documents, Gallagher has not yet agreed them, and they should be checked before anyone relies on them. The tool's Terms of use say the same.
We also rewrote the site's copy in plainer words, with shorter sentences. The meaning and the method are unchanged.
Expanding, exporting and printing a chart
Every chart now has an Expand button, and clicking the chart does the same. The chart opens large, with its key, its table of figures, its notes and its definition. It works from the keyboard. Esc closes it, and focus returns to where it was.
Every chart also has an Export menu with two choices: its figures as a CSV, or the chart printed on its own as a PDF under a cover made for it. The cover gives the title, the definition, the clubs, the years, the unit and the date. Print this view and Print full report produce branded A4 sheets: a cover with contents, then one chart to a page with its legend, figures, notes and definition. Every page is numbered. Page breaks and page numbers come out the same in every browser, and a long table continues on the next sheet with its header repeated. By 9 October there were 23 charts across the four comparison views, and every one of them prints on its own.
We tried an image export on 9 October and withdrew it the same day in favour of the PDF.
The PDF has a limit. It goes through the browser's print dialog, because the site has no server of its own that makes PDFs.
Back to 2018/19
The figures now run from 2018/19 to 2025/26 for the review of a single club. Comparison across clubs still covers 2020/21 to 2025/26.
Where a club's own reports give nothing for a figure, we use a secondary source and mark it as such on the Sources tab. Where the two disagree, the club's own figure is kept. We found 294 places where the documents disagreed. Each was resolved by that rule.
The new figures include policy-year tonnage, call income, premium, claims and combined ratio; figures per gross ton; invested assets and their allocation; general or target increases; and Solvency II capital, the requirement and the headroom over it.
They feed a new Review section, which takes one club at a time across 20 charts on 8 tabs: Overview, Tonnage, Policy year, Financial year, Underwriting, Investment, Call history and Financial strength. A figure not published leaves a gap or is hatched with an N/P mark.
Some of the older figures rest on a secondary source for now. That is the weakest part of the tool as it stands. Checking those figures against the clubs' own documents is the next piece of work.
Terms, storage and the phone
The site now has Terms of use, a Privacy policy and a Cookie policy, linked from the foot of every page. A reader's choices, meaning the clubs selected and the view, are kept for the visit only. They are kept between visits only if the reader accepts, through a notice with two equal answers, "Decline all" and "Accept all", and "Storage choices" in the foot reopens it. This follows PECR and the UK GDPR. All three documents are awaiting review by a qualified adviser, and they will change when Gallagher takes the tool over.
The figures are no longer held in plain text in the site's files, so they cannot be picked up by searching or indexing the site. A browser still has to open them to show them, so a determined reader can recover them, and only a sign-in in front of the site would stop that. There is none yet. The tool runs on a preview host until Gallagher decides where it is hosted and how people sign in.
The layout below 600px wide was reworked for phones. Laptop and desktop pages are unchanged. On every screen, the header and title band now stay at the top as the page scrolls.