Terms and Conditions

The practice

Callum Broadhurst reads terms and conditions.

Not skims. Reads, from clause one to the end, before agreeing, on every service he signs up to, since 2014.

He is aware that this makes him, to almost everybody, a lunatic. He is a contracts manager for a construction firm and reading terms is what he does for a living, and it has bled into his personal life in a way his wife describes as "a hobby, at best."

The arithmetic

The average consumer agreement runs to about eleven thousand words. He signs up to perhaps twenty services a year.

That is two hundred and twenty thousand words a year, which is roughly three novels, which is four to six hours a month.

Eleven years.

The findings

In eleven years of this he has found four things worth finding.

One (2016). A cycling app whose terms granted it a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide licence to all uploaded route data including the right to sub-license. Not unusual. What was unusual was that it defined route data to include the home address entered in the profile.

He emailed them. He got a template. He emailed again quoting the clause number. He got a person. Four months later the terms changed.

He has never had any confirmation that these events were connected and assumes they were not.

Two (2018). A subscription box with a clause requiring ninety days' notice of cancellation. Legal, but buried at 8.4 under a heading about delivery.

He told about four hundred people about this on a forum. He believes this achieved nothing.

Three (2021). An insurance policy that excluded claims arising from "activities requiring specialist equipment," undefined.

He asked the insurer, in writing, whether cycling required specialist equipment. They said no. He asked them to confirm in writing that a bicycle was not specialist equipment.

They did. He kept it. He has never needed it and it is in a folder called T&Cs which his wife has seen and has not commented on.

Four

Four is the reason he still does it.

In March 2023 he signed up to a small local service — a delivery co-operative, eleven vans, covering four counties.

Their terms were four pages, which was suspicious in itself.

Clause 11 said:

11. If we damage or lose your item we will replace it or refund it, whichever you prefer. We will not ask you to prove its value beyond telling us. If you tell us something untrue we will find out eventually and stop delivering to you, and that is the whole of our fraud policy.

Callum read it three times.

Then he read the rest, which took eleven minutes, and which contained no arbitration clause, no limitation of liability, no unilateral variation right, and — the thing he genuinely could not believe — a clause stating that if they went out of business they would return any prepaid balance before paying themselves.

What he did

He wrote to them.

Not to complain. He wrote four paragraphs explaining who he was, what he did for a living, and that in nine years of reading consumer terms professionally and personally he had never seen a set drafted like this, and asking who had written them.

He got a reply the next day from a man called Errol.

Errol said he had written them himself in 2019, on the grounds that he had read his own previous provider's terms and had not liked them, and that a solicitor had subsequently told him they were commercially reckless and he had ignored her.

He said he had been running for four years and had had eleven claims, of which one was probably dishonest.

Now

Callum still reads them. Every one.

He has found nothing since 2023.

He has recommended the delivery co-operative to about sixty people, which he calculates has been worth more to Errol than any of the four findings have been worth to anybody, and which he considers, on balance, the entire return on eleven years and two and a half million words.

His wife has asked whether he will stop now.

He said no, and she said why, and he said — and this is the closest he has come to explaining it —

"Because I read four pages once and found out somebody meant it."