Lloyd's Acts (1871-1982)

In 1871 the Westminster Parliament passed a private Act, the Lloyd's Act, which turned the association of underwriters meeting at Lloyd's into a legal person, the Society of Lloyd's. Until then Lloyd's was a club: members, rented rooms, registers, and no legal existence of its own. The Act gave it an object, marine insurance written by its members and the spread of shipping intelligence, and a Committee to run it. The 1911 Act widened the object to non-marine classes, which the market was already writing. Nothing in that first structure said how to discipline a member, or how to separate interests that got in each other's way. The 1982 Act took that on, after a string of affairs in the late 1970s and the report of the working party chaired by Sir Henry Fisher, published in 1980. It created the Council of Lloyd's and gave it the power to make byelaws. Above all it imposed divestment: a broking group could no longer own the agency managing the syndicates to which it brought its risks, and the groups concerned were given a few years to sell. Its section 14 grants the Society and the Council a general immunity from damages claims, bad faith excepted. The Names tested it in the 1990s: their suits against the Corporation ran into that text, and they turned to the agencies instead, on the duty of care that Henderson v Merrett recognized in 1994. Since 2001 the financial services statute has put the market under a general regulator; the Lloyd's Acts still organize internal governance, but Lloyd's is no longer its own sole judge. Not to be confused with the Council of Lloyd's, the body the 1982 Act created, nor with market bulletins, which are acts of the Corporation and not statutes.