We comment on Martin Curtice's article on expert and professional reports for the Court of Protection, which highlights the importance of ‘clear explanation’ in mental capacity assessment. We put the Court in a broader context of the Mental Capacity Act and summarise recent research and education that aims to help give clinicians working in England and Wales capacity assessment guidance that is clinically grounded, multi-perspectival and legally defensible.

Expert judgement is frequently used within general insurance. It tends to be a method of last resort and used where data is sparse, non-existent or non-applicable to the problem under consideration. Whilst such judgements can significantly influence the end results, their quality is highly variable. The use of the term “expert judgement” itself can lend a generous impression of credibility to what may be a little more than a guess. Despite the increased emphasis placed on the importance of robust expert judgements in regulation, actuarial research to date has focussed on the more technical or data-driven methods, with less emphasis on how to use and incorporate softer information or how best to elicit judgements from others in a way that reduces cognitive biases. This paper highlights the research that the Getting Better Judgement Working Party has conducted in this area. Specifically, it covers the variable quality of expert judgement, both within and outside the regulatory context, and presents methods that may be applied to improve its formation. The aim of this paper is to arm the insurance practitioner with tools to distinguish between low-quality and high-quality judgements and improve the robustness of judgements accordingly, particularly for highly material circumstances.

Expert judgement has been used since the actuarial profession was founded. In the past, there has often been a lack of transparency regarding the use of expert judgement, even though those judgements could have a very significant impact on the outputs of calculations and the decisions made by organisations. The lack of transparency has a number of dimensions, including the nature of the underlying judgements, as well as the process used to derive those judgements. This paper aims to provide a practical framework regarding expert judgement processes, and how those processes may be validated. It includes a worked example illustrating how the process could be used for setting a particular assumption. It concludes with some suggested tools for use within expert judgement. Although primarily focussed on the insurance sector, the proposed process framework could be applied more widely without the need for significant changes.